Our sense of smell…seems easy--you take a sniff and, ah, the smell of bread baking, or wildflowers in the spring or, uh, oh! Somebody made a skunk angry! But the process is quite complex. The nose picks up a scent within the fluctuating environment of swirling air and changing mixtures of odorants, and the brain processes all that to distinguish what the odors are, where they are coming from and what the proper response should be (you probably dont want to lean in closer to that skunk!). Interestingly, though, a recent study in Nature Neuroscience of the rat olfactory system demonstrated that the response of individual mitral/tufted (M/T) cells in the olfactory bulb linearly sum inputs of a given odor across time—a surprisingly simple basis for a very complex system. For a summary of the work see sciencedaily/releases/2015/01/150112135416.htm. To read the original article, go to nature/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3913.html.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 23:34:24 +0000
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