Systemic Brain Activity May Represent Processes of Odor Quality
Issued Date
2017-09-02
Citation
Bae, Ji Sub. (2017-09-02). Systemic Brain Activity May Represent Processes of Odor Quality. 27th Annual Meeting of the European Chemoreception Research Organization (ECRO), 18–19. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjx077
Type
Conference Paper
ISSN
0379-864X
Abstract
How we discriminate odors is an important question. According to previous studies, perceiving distinct odors begins with activating distinct combination of olfactory receptor (OR) repertoire in olfactory receptor neurons (ORN). This effect consecutively activates distinct ORN and these distinct ORN activities encode in olfactory bulb. Encoded odor information finally is processed in the brain so we can perceive and discriminate odors. However, these studies still remain the question why distinct OR repertoires induce distinct brain activities, and similar neural encoding of olfactory bulb induces distinct odor responses. To solve these questions, it is needed to study in the brain that lastly processes odor information. Thus, this study focused on how similar perceiving odors process in the brain.
We used two odors 2-acetylpyrazine (AP) and 2, 3, 5-trimethly pyrazine (TP) that describe as similar perceptual descriptor and used heptanal (HA) which different category odor compare to AP and TP. To measure the direct brain signal, electroencephalography (EEG) signal was used to understand how participant process odor in the brain. Power spectrum and event related spectral perturbation (ERSP) of theta, alpha, beta and gamma frequency bands are used to verify similarity between AP and TP.
Interestingly, AP and TP induce similar pattern of power spectrum in total electrodes but not in HA. These results suggest that these two odors activated similar region of brain. Also ERSP results of AP and TP suggest that AP and TP induce similar theta wave pattern in 0~500ms and similar alpha, beta pattern in 500~2000ms. In case of HA, signal became similar with AP and TP at 500~2000ms but not in 0~500ms. These results emphasize that AP and TP may induce similar brain activity especially in 0~500ms but this differences are diminished after 500ms.
Based on these results, similar perceiving odors may induce similar systemic brain activity. Moreover, processing odor quality may end within 500ms.
