The nose knows
Harvard researchers have illuminated how the brain processes information about odor, linking a temporal pattern of electrical spikes traveling through the nervous system with specific smells and behaviors in laboratory animals. In the first such research done on awake, moving animals, Naoshige Uchida, an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology, and graduate student Kevin Cury tracked the effects of single sniffs in an area of the brain called the olfactory bulb, which receives and processes odor information from rats’ noses. The two researchers found that, contrary to the conventional view that information on smell is contained in the number of neural spikes per unit of time within the olfactory bulb, the temporal pattern of those spikes over time appeared to be most important in relaying information from the nose to other parts of the brain. The researchers found these patterns to be reproducible in separate trials that involved the same rats...