Sniffing helps animals identify smells and connect them to places and events, but noses can’t sense time or place. How do brains connect odors with internal models of the world? Our preprint suggests that the olfactory bulb participates in this connection. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - ThreadSky

mattsmear.bsky.social • 94 days ago

Sniffing helps animals identify smells and connect them to places and events, but noses can’t sense time or place.

How do brains connect odors with internal models of the world?

Our preprint suggests that the olfactory bulb participates in this connection.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.06.622362v1.full.pdf

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mattsmear.bsky.social•94 days ago

This work was led by @sterrett-sc.bsky.social and Reese Findley, in a collaboration with James Murray & Adrienne Fairhall.

mattsmear.bsky.social•94 days ago

To ask whether olfactory bulb carries information about how, when, and where a mouse sniffs, we put mice in a room and recorded their behavior and spikes.

We did not impose olfactory stimuli or task structure, so that mice experienced only ambient stimuli and generated spontaneous behavior.

mattsmear.bsky.social•94 days ago

Even in this unstructured condition, the movement and sniffing of the mice was highly structured. We described this structure with a hidden markov model

mattsmear.bsky.social•94 days ago

This states of this model synchronized with stateful structure in the olfactory bulb population dynamics

mattsmear.bsky.social•94 days ago

At the single neuron level, the stateful structure of the population dynamics can be explained by the fact that many individual neurons vary their firing rates with the animal's sniff frequency. We display this selectivity with "Sniff fields" (SnFs) that describe how neurons track breathing rhythms.

mattsmear.bsky.social•94 days ago

In addition, the olfactory bulb encodes "place", the mouse's location in its environment. Individual neurons show significant variation in their firing as a function of place, comparable to the selectivity of hippocampal neurons recorded in the same conditions.

raniergutierrez.bsky.social•89 days ago

I love this video, freely moving is the way

mattsmear.bsky.social•89 days ago

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