In a finding that holds lessons for restaurateurs and advertisers, researchers from the Department of Experimental Psychology have discovered that visually presented words can influence the perception of smells – with pleasant words influencing the effects that odours have on even early levels of brain processing of smell. In their experiments, the results of which were published in the 19 May issue of Neuron, the researchers presented people with a smell that was somewhat like brie: it could be considered as pleasant, or perhaps not. When presented, it was paired with a label that read either ‘cheddar cheese’ or ‘body odour.’ Subjects rated the odour significantly more pleasant when it was labelled ‘cheddar cheese’. The researchers then scanned the subjects’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during the presentation of the test odour. They found that the word label modulated the response of basic olfactory processing areas, such as the orbitofrontal cortex, to the test odour. There was more brain activity if the label was ‘cheddar cheese’ than if it was ‘body odour’, and the amount of brain activity was correlated with the pleasantness ratings given by the participants. Professor Edmund Rolls, who led the research, said: ‘The results of this study show that high-level cognitive inputs, such as the sight of a word, influence the early cortical areas of the brain that are activated by olfactory stimuli, and play a significant part in our subjective responses to odours. Part of the interest of the study is that it shows that cognitive influences, originating from as high in processing as linguistic representations, can reach down into the orbitofrontal cortex – a ‘lower level’ part of the brain which deals with reward and emotion – to modulate responses there. The experiment thus shows that linguistic representations can influence how emotional states are represented in the brain and thus experienced.’