Dogs Might Actually 'See' Through Smells, Brain Scans Suggest

Dogs have a powerful sense of smell, from sniffing out diseases to being interested in poop. The amount of smell wiring within a dog's brain was surprising.

A researcher at Cornell University and her colleagues have just mapped the brain pathways of a domestic dog.

The team built 3D maps of the dog brain's nerve tracts and traced extensive white matter linking olfactory brain regions, revealing a huge, previously unknown, information highway between dogs' olfactory and visual systems.

Pip Johnson, a researcher at Cornell University, says that they have never seen a connection between the nose and the occipital cortex in a dog.

The consistency was really good. The size of these tracts was more similar to what you would see in our visual systems.

Even without sight, our clever canine friends are able to function well. Blind dogs can play fetch.

Eileen Jenkin, who was not part of the study, said that it was wonderful.

There are a lot of people who theorize that the connection is based on the behavior of trained dogs and detection dogs.

A dog's nose has more than 220 million odor- detecting cells compared to our 50 million or so.

Dogs can form spatial awareness, read chemical communications, sense our moods, and track all sorts of things with this snuffling organ alone. All these connections add up.

Johnson says that it makes a lot of sense in dogs.

The study shows that olfaction is integrated with vision in the way that dogs orient themselves in their environment.

The researchers found information pathways of white brain matter connecting the olfactory bulb with four other brain regions.

There is a map of the dog's brain. Pip Johnson is the creator of Trackvis software.

The olfactory pathways to the piriform cortex and limbic system are similar to those in humans. The pink path is believed to connect to memory and smell.

The olfactory bulb and brain stem are connected through the corticospinal tract. The connections may allow for more instinctual responses to smells without the need for higher brain processing.

The researchers were able to confirm what they saw in the images.

Before we can say for certain what these physical connections mean, we need to conduct research on the brain regions from other species.

Although the brain is capable of some pretty weird things, we don't know if dogs can smell.

The team concludes in their paper that the olfactory system is a vital network to consider when studying canine cognitive functions.

They want to map the olfactory system of cats and horses. Both horses and humans have amazing powers of smell, but they use their sense of smell differently.

Preliminary data shows that cats have more olfactory brain tracts than dogs.

This research was published in a neuroscience journal.