These are the cells that live in the mucus in the back of your nose where they busily relay odor information to your brain. Any one of them can respond to many different odors.
Thing is, these neurons only live for around 60 days. When they die they are replaced by news ones. So the question is, with so much turnover in our little sniffers, how do we remember smells year after year?
The answer is almost over my head, but has to do with patterns and scent memory in the brain. Turns out our scent memory is quite stable, despite all the constant "rewiring." Pretty neat-o, huh?
Learn much more in this article from Scientific American. Then come back and explain it to me.
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