There are a TON of reviews on olfaction (including some written by us), and to some extent although amazing progress is being made, it is hard to put it all in context. Check our David Brann’s latest work in Annual Reviews of Neuroscience here, where he makes the argument that the reason it is worth studying olfaction  — despite its many differences from other sensory modalities — is that it has important and general things to teach us about brain function. These include questions about receptor-odor interactions (which map onto the very important problem of understanding how drugs, neurotransmitters and neuromodulators collectively and differentially ligate their suite of cognate receptors), the function of recurrence (which is, of course, fundamental to thinking about interactions between bottom-up and top-down neural mechanisms) and odor-driven behavior (which reflect the dramatic evolution in technology and thinking about naturalistic behaviors and their relationship to neural activity). His arguments are provocative, but helpful for understanding why the work we do in the lab is ultimately is centered not on the nose (figuratively, of course – we do plenty of work on the nose), but on the brain.