The Predictive Nature of Smell Perception

Today, you’ll learn about how diversifying farms has a ton of upsides and virtually no downsides, the way we tend to predict how something will smell before we smell it, and a universally shared preference for simple rhythms in music.  

Diversified Farming  

• “Major study reports that people and environment both benefit from diversified farming, while bottom lines also thrive.” University of Copenhagen. 2024.  
• “Joint environmental and social benefits from diversified agriculture.” by Laura Vang Rasmussen, et al. 2024.  
• “The Green Revolution: Norman Borlaug and the Race to Fight Global Hunger.” by Ray Offenheiser. 2020.  

Sense of Smell  

• “The sense of smell is influenced by cues from other senses.” Stockholm University. 2024.  
• “Olfactory categorization is shaped by a transmodal cortical network for evaluating perceptual predictions.” by Stephen Pierzchajlo, et al. 2024.  

Simple Rhythms 

• “Cross-cultural research reveals universal bias towards simple rhythmic ratios in music.” by Eric W. Dolan. 2024.  
• “Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries.” by Nori Jacoby, et al. 2024.  

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