Brain scans reveal where taste and smell become flavor

Taste and smell are so intimately connected that a whiff of well-loved foods evokes their taste without any conscious effort.

Now, brain scans and machine learning have for the first time pinpointed the region responsible for this sensory overlap in humans, a region called the insula, researchers report September 12 in Nature Communications.

The findings could explain why people crave certain foods or are turned away from them, says Ivan de Araujo, a neuroscientist at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany.

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