An NRC Handelsblad Book of the Year "Offers rich discussions of olfactory perception, the conscious and subconscious impacts of smell on behavior and emotion."-ScienceDecades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli "spark" neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. We think of the brain as a space we can map: here it responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation. But the sense of smell-only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience-doesn't work this way.

So what does the nose tell the brain, and how does the...