In humans, smell is often viewed as an aesthetic sense, as a sense capable of eliciting enduring thoughts and memories. Smell, however, is the primal sense. It is the sense that affords most organisms the ability to detect food, predators, and mates.

The identification of a population of olfactory sensory neurons innervating a single glomerulus that mediates robust avoidance to a naturally occurring odorant provides insight in the neural circuitry that underlies this innate behavior.

All animals exhibit innate behaviors in response to specific sensory stimuli that are likely to result from the activation of developmentally programmed circuits.

Richard Axel Quotes