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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		Connecting the dots between the brain's smell navigation & human mental health
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2016-02-11 00:00:00
	Description:		When it comes to the mechanisms behind our sense of smell, there’s so much we still don’t understand. Psychologist Lucia Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley is a pioneer in odor mapping and will be using National Science Foundation funding to help crack the olfactory code in humans and animals. Part of her lab will be looking into the brain’s role in smell navigation in human mental health. "One of the first symptoms of an illness, and that includes major depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and sociopathy. All of these medical illnesses have in common, and dementias, that you lose your sense of smell; you have an impaired sense of smell. And really, no one understands why that is." Jacobs says her new lab will study human olfaction, specifically what’s going on with the olfactory navigation system in people with dementia. "And see if we can add to a new diagnostic tool or help people with their day-to-day lives. How does the impaired olfaction impact that? Maybe if we understand that we can help that."
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