Arianna Ever

Abstract: The presentation addresses a research area in which olfaction is considered a sensory system that maintains functional communication with the sleeping brain. The focus is not on a single effect related to memory, dreaming, or clinical intervention, but on the layered organization of odor processing during sleep: from anatomical pathways and the activity of olfactory circuits to respiration, cortical rhythms, limbic responses, and plasticity.

The presentation will examine the processing chain of odors during sleep: the physicochemical properties of a substance — subjective odor perception — perception of the odor as familiar or unfamiliar — and the individually formed semantics of the odor, shaped by prior experience. These levels will be related to sleep physiology, emotional regulation, cognitive-mnestic processes during sleep, and the emotional tone and content of dreams. This approach shows that the effect of an odor during sleep is determined not only by the stimulus itself but also by prior experience: the same odor may differently affect sleep quality, respiration, arousal level, dream content, and subsequent recall.

This framework allows existing findings to be systematized, supports the consideration of controlled olfactory stimulation as an adjunctive method for disorders of the psychoemotional spectrum, and outlines directions for further research.

Speaker: Arianna Ever, a leading specialist at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, specializes in cognitive psychology and ethology. Her interests include interspecies communication, olfactory perception, and learning. Her research focuses on developing methods for studying interspecies interactions in the context of olfactory learning (based on training scent detection dogs).