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So our brains are working away even while we sleep?  That's the idea behind a new study that's found that " memory of specific odors (along with many other things) depends on the ability of the brain to learn, process and recall accurately and effectively during slow-wave sleep — a deep sleep characterized by slow brain waves." If more can be learned from better understanding of how the brain processes odors, researchers believe it could lead to novel therapies that target specific neurons in the brain, perhaps enhancing memory consolidation and memory accuracy, according to newswise.com. Researchers showed in experiments with rats that odor memory was strengthened when odors sensed the previous day were replayed during sleep, the Web site reports. Memories deepened more when odor reinforcement occurred during sleep than when rats were awake. When the memory of a specific odor learned when the rats were awake was replayed during slow-wave sleep, they achieved

Imagine this. You can lose weight by using your nose. Researchers have found that humans can use smell to detect dietary levels of fat, according to newswise.com.  As food smell almost always is detected before taste, the findings identify one of the first sensory qualities that signals whether a food contains fat. Innovative methods using odor to make low-fat foods more palatable could someday aid public health efforts to reduce dietary fat intake. “The human sense of smell is far better at guiding us through our everyday lives than we give it credit for,” said senior author Johan Lundström, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at Monell at newswise.com. “That we have the ability to detect and discriminate minute differences in the fat content of our food suggests that this ability must have had considerable evolutionary importance.”   The reason?  " As the most calorically dense nutrient, fat has been a desired energy source across much of human evolution," the Web site

"The Doctors," that smug-Dr.-Phil show, was on in the background this morning and one of their segments caught my eye. Some woman asked if she plugged her nose while she was eating, would she eat less.  In other words, does your sense of smell affect how much you eat? They did a cute little demo of blindfolding her and clipping her nose, then fed her bits of food and tried to get her to identify them.  She only guessed potato right, but even with her sense of smell cut off, she still knew when the taste was a muffin.   "That's go-ooo-od," she said. So, here's the deal.  Our sense of smell is very important to our eating habits, but probably not in the way you think.  A friend recently lost his sense of smell from using too much nasal spray and now he eats everything he can get his hands on, hoping desperately to get a taste of some thing. But those of us who have noses who work can be thankful that they allow us to savor our food, to pick out the swe