What the nose tells the brain

by Dmitry Rinberg

at Physics Colloquium

Tue, 05 Dec 2017, 15:30
Nanotechnology institute building (#51) room 15

Abstract

All living organisms extract chemical information from the surrounding world We know a lot about the genetic cellular and anatomical organization of our sense of smell which has very similar organization from insects to mammals However we still do not know basic principles of odor coding organization of the odor parameter space and how odors are represented in the brain We do not know how we can discriminate different sorts of wines but group all wines in one category How can we recognize coffee independently of its concentrations and in the presence of the smell of a bakery In humans odors are sensed by millions of receptor cells using 350 types of receptor cells Flies have 60 and mice 1000 receptor types An odor evokes a concentration dependent spatial temporal pattern of receptor cell activity We are presented with an immensely complex combinatorial computation And the central question of my research is to understand how these patterns are read by the brain In this talk I will present our recent results on testing a novel model for concentration invariant odor coding based on temporal ranking of receptors And then I will discuss our attempt to build a theory of odor space representation in the brain based on this model

Created on 03-11-2017 by Bar Lev, Yevgeny (ybarlev)
Updaded on 03-11-2017 by Bar Lev, Yevgeny (ybarlev)