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At the beginning, there is Mom’s scent...
Soon after birth, infants recognize their mother’s odour. An initial contact that is essential for their future relationship. For the first time, a team from the US has deciphered the process enabling our little ones to identify Mom’s scent.
In fact, it is all based upon neuronal connections. Because all informations -even olfactory ones- that we memorize are stored at this level. Kevin Franks and Jeffry Isaacson of the San Diego School of Medicine, California, studied this phenomenon on the brains of newborn rats.
They identified two receptors -AMPA and NMDA- which may play a key role in infant’s olfaction. Their conclusions are published this month in Neuron. And in fact, it appears that, providing the newborn rats have inhaled their mother’s scent, "as (they) age, the fraction of NMDA receptors tend to go down in the brain olfactory processing region called the ’lateral olfactory tract’. During a critical period of a few weeks after birth, the olfactory-deprived side of the animals’ brains showed a decrease in NMDA receptor activity compared to the spared side. This relative reduction of NMDA receptor activity caused the neurons to become more active, since AMPA receptors convert neurons to those that are more functional and less silent."
The infant will thus identify -and remember- his/her mom’s natural scent thanks to neuronal connections. "These results indicate the importance of early olfactory experience in the establishment of cortical circuits. And it could reflect mechanisms governing early olfactory imprinting." The mother’s odour would trigger off the newborn’s olfactory memory.
Source: Neuron, 7 July 2005
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