About the size of a kidney bean, our olfactory bulb is one of the smaller parts of the human brain, and also one of the more amazing. Its prime function is to process signals from a host of olfactory neurons, then serve their response patterns up to the brain, which recognizes odors based on past experiences.
A universal truth that keeps popping up in my search of the literature is that nothing is as simple as it seems. A sniff seems just a simple movement of air, but it’s actually way more than that: it’s a psychomotor event. One crucial function is to synchronize the olfactory receptor cells with the olfactory bulb and other smell-related brain regions, especially the primary olfactory processing center, the piriform cortex. This allows different regions to communicate with each other…