Walk by a bakery, and you’ll smell fresh-baked bread. But would you smell it, if you’d never learned what bread was? “Not necessarily,” says Thomas A. Cleland, associate professor of psychology.
“The very concept of having odors that you recognize and identify, even being able to pick them out of the messy olfactory world out there, absolutely depends on learning,” says Cleland in a Cornell Research story. “I argue that learning is fundamental to even being able to smell at all.”
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Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
