Feeling stressed makes the world smell worse

Stress can make the world around us smell unpleasant, the results of a new study suggest. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison used powerful brain imaging technologies to examine how stress and anxiety “re-wire” the brain, according to the Independent newspaper. A team of psychologists led by Professor Wen Li discovered that when a person experiences stress, emotion systems and olfactory processing in the brain become linked, making inoffensive smells become unpleasant. Although the emotion and olfactory systems within the brain are usually found next to each other, there is rarely ‘crosstalk’ between the two. Writing in the Journal of