Mysteries of the Mind
Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions
Aside from the basic inhibition against walking up to someone and sniffing, humans are no different. "An odor is not just a name--it is a whole context," says psychiatrist Dolores Malaspina of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia University Medical Center. Olfactory information is "privileged," Malaspina explains, since it is the only one of our five senses that does not make a brief stop at the brain's relay station, the thalamus, before going to the ever so intellectual prefrontal cortex. Smell is unmediated, unfiltered, and it hits the prefrontal cortex with a wallop of intensity. Researchers have found that smell plays a strong role in our mating choices, even without our knowing it. And when female roommates synchronize their menstrual cycles, it is because the unconscious perception of odor sets off the endocrine system. Our brains, says Malaspina, "beginning with fetal development, are laid out to give precedence to olfactory perception."
But what happens if olfactory perception doesn't work properly? Malaspina and other researchers are looking at the olfactory sense in emotional disorders and have found some intriguing results. While schizophrenia is seen as a disorder of hallucinations and delusions, a more compelling and disruptive element of the disorder is social impairment. Some people with schizophrenia can't seem to read social cues, or manage social relationships, or summon a social context for whatever encounter they are experiencing. And while hallucinations and delusions can be controlled often through medication, these basic social impairments cause far more difficulty in dealing with the daily demands of life.
Research has shown that many people with schizophrenia can also suffer from "clinically meaningful olfactory impairment," which includes dysfunction in higher brain centers such as the parietal lobes--the part of the brain that's responsible for integrating sensory output so as to understand something, like reading social cues or contextualizing those cues. Just as a smell can elicit an immediate image of a particular time and place, lacking that ability can deprive someone of a basic social and emotional anchor in life. "What we are learning is that smell is a good window into the unconscious basis for sociability and social interest," says Malaspina. "There is a tremendous explosion of interest in this forgotten sense. And it was under our noses all the time."
The scenario occurs in hospital rooms throughout the world, thousands of times every day. A brain-damaged father or mother or child lies in bed, not completely unconscious, not in a coma, but demonstrating only flickering consciousness, small behaviors that show there is some evidence of the person who once was there, some evidence that this person perhaps knows friends and family members are near by. Medically, these patients are categorized as existing in a minimally conscious state of awareness; it is estimated that there are 100,000 to 300,000 Americans in such a state right now. Sometimes these patients are able to actually utter the name of an object or to follow a very simple command. But for friends and family, they are no longer themselves. And because they find language so difficult, it is also assumed that they are unlikely to follow conversations.
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