R´emi Gervais is a research director at the CNRS, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Lyon. Dani`ele Dubois is a research director at the CNRS, Institut National de la Langue Fran¸caise. Benoist Schaal is a research director at the CNRS, Centre Europ´een des Sciences du Goˆut. The approach is integrative, combining perspectives from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics, and is appropriate for students and researchers in all these areas who seek the authoritative reference on olfaction, taste, and cognition.Ĭatherine Rouby is an associate professor of neuroscience at Universit´e Claude Bernard. Leading experts have written chapters on many facets of taste and smell, including odor memory, cortical representations, psychophysics and functional imaging studies, genetic variation in taste, and the hedonistic dimensions of odors. The book is conveniently divided into sections, including linguistic representations, emotion, memory, neural bases, and individual variation. This book presents the first multidisciplinary synthesis of the literature in olfactory and gustatory cognition.
Yet the available data on the high-order cognitive implications of taste and smell are scattered among journals in many fields, with no single source synthesizing the large body of knowledge, much of which has appeared in the past decade. Our bodies have in turn developed complex processing systems that manifest themselves in our emotions, memory, and language. The human organs of perception are continually being bombarded with chemicals from the environment.