Sense of smell: A giant interneuron for sparse coding

The brain is a coding machine: it translates physical inputs from the world into visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile perceptions via the mysterious language of its nerve cells and the networks which they form. Neural codes could in principle take many forms, but in regions forming bottlenecks for information flow (e.g., the optic nerve) or in areas important for memory, sparse codes are highly desirable. Scientists have now discovered a single neuron in the brain of locusts that enables the adaptive regulation of sparseness in olfactory codes.

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