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Smell, or olfaction, is a chemoreception that forms the sense of smell. Olfaction has many purposes, such as the detection of hazards, pheromones, and food. It integrates with other senses to form the sense of flavor. [8] Olfaction occurs when odorants bind to specific sites on olfactory receptors located in the nasal cavity. [9]
It is mainly used for the sense of balance and for spatial orientation. When the vestibular system is stimulated without any other inputs, one experiences a sense of self-motion. For example, a person in complete darkness and sitting in a chair will sense that they have turned to the left if the chair is turned to the left.
Special somatic afferent fibers (SSA) are the afferent nerve fibers that carry information from the special senses of vision, hearing and balance. The cranial nerves containing SSA fibers are the optic nerve (CN II) and the vestibulocochlear nerve (CN VIII).
The environment acts as an external stimulus, and tactile perception is the act of passively exploring the world to simply sense it. To make sense of the stimuli, an organism will undergo active exploration, or haptic perception, by moving their hands or other areas with environment-skin contact. [16]
The olfactory bulb is a special structure that processes olfactory sensory signals and sends its output to the olfactory part of the pallium. It is a major brain component in many vertebrates, but is greatly reduced in humans and other primates (whose senses are dominated by information acquired by sight rather than smell). [48]
Sense organs are transducers that convert data from the outer physical world to the realm of the mind where people interpret the information, creating their perception of the world around them. [ 1 ] The receptive field is the area of the body or environment to which a receptor organ and receptor cells respond.
A 2-D model of cortical sensory homunculus. A cortical homunculus (from Latin homunculus 'little man, miniature human' [1] [2]) is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and portions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, and/or sensory functions, for different parts of the body.
Cross-section through the spiral organ of Corti at greater magnification, showing position of the hair cells on the basement membrane. The organ of Corti is located in the scala media of the cochlea of the inner ear between the vestibular duct and the tympanic duct and is composed of mechanosensory cells, known as hair cells. [2]