Brain scans reveal where taste and smell combine to become flavor

Flavor isn’t just on your tongue — it’s also in your brain. New scans identify a part of the brain that fuses taste and smell into flavor. Smell and taste are so connected that a whiff of a well-loved food evokes its taste without any thinking. These senses become linked the moment we bite into something, says Putu Agus Khorisantono. He’s a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.