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Published online 27 March 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.697
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Shocking the nose into action
An electric shock helps people to better discriminate between smells.
Find it hard to identify the smell? A teaching session backed by electric shocks might teach you to learn the difference.
Wen Li, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and her colleagues, have shown that the brain can be shocked into sniffing out the differences between molecules that they would not usually be able to distinguish by smell.
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