It's more complex than once thought
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Zhou and his colleagues wanted to see whether the brain’s analysis of odor molecules could perceive something less than a complete molecule. They reasoned that, if only whole molecules work, then after being exposed to a part of an odorant molecule, the test subjects would smell the original molecule exactly the same way. If, by contrast, the brain was able to pick up on the smell of a molecule’s substructures, neurons would adapt to the substructure. When re-exposed to the original molecule, subjects would not sense it nearly as strongly.
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