Synthetic odors created by activating brain cells help neuroscientists understand how smell works
When you experience something with your senses, it evokes complex patterns of activity in your brain. One important goal in neuroscience is to decipher how these neural patterns drive the sensory experience.
For example, can the smell of chocolate be represented by a single brain cell, groups of cells firing all at the same time or cells firing in some precise symphony? The answers to these questions will lead to a broader understanding of how our brains represent the external world. They also have implications for treating disorders where the brain fails in representing the external world: for example, in the loss of sight of smell.
To understand how the brain drives sensory experience, my colleagues and I focus on the sense of smell in mice. We directly control a mouse’s neural activit...