A new model for how the brain perceives unique odors
Oct 2021, phys.org
So here is a scientist, a physicist by name, with an interest in the information-processing abilities of biological, and neurological systems. It didn't take him long, I would imagine, to realize that olfaction is a prime model for complex information-processing systems; it was the first sense, used by the first bacteria to detect chemicals in the primordial soup, later used by animals to make a big, complex mammal brain. If you want to look at how information processing happens in biological systems, this would be the ideal place to look.
But first, you have to throw into the garbage everything you know about olfaction already, which should be easy for a computational information scientist. What they did here was to look far out, all the way out -- beyond molecules and their myriad physico-chemical characteristics, of which the molecules themselves number in the billions; beyond genetics and their 30% variation across the global population; beyond cultural effects that are almost too surreal to quantify for methodical research purposes, like where Americans prefer peppermint since it's associated with candy, yet older folks from England don't like mint since it's associated with pain-relief products of their era, or the easier comparison of preference for durian fruit or Époisses de Bourgogne cheese.
Too messy, said the computational information scientist. And so they put it all in the blender, all those variables together. And they called it noise. Boil it all down, cancel it all out, all that dirty data of molecules and genes and cultural and personal association. Throw it all in the same bin, and call it noise. That's what they did.
Actually, they didn't call it noise, they called it "context" --
"If you experience odors in a similar context, even if they were initially rather different in the responses they evoked in the nose, they begin to be represented by similar neural responses so they become the same in your head," Balasubramanian says.The researchers found that their simplified model could be used to reproduce the same types of results seen in olfaction experiments. It's something that Balasubramanian did not expect to see, as he thought that such a complex process would require "learning and plasticity" in order to adapt and change neural synapses to modify the brain's representation of smells. "We may have found a general strategy of using certain kinds of randomized signals to entrain those effects," he says about their results. "It doesn't have to be just olfaction; it can be elsewhere, too." -medicalexpress
Did you see that? "It doesn't have to be olfaction; it can be elsewhere too." Olfactively-piqued, computational information neuroscientist, where have you been? Proving that the nose-brain is the neural model par excellence, while showing us how it actually works, both at the same time.
*If you want to know more about why olfaction is the ideal model for growing an artificial brain from scratch, it's a constant theme in Hidden Scents.
via University of Pennsylvania: Gaia Tavoni et al, Cortical feedback and gating in odor discrimination and generalization, PLOS Computational Biology (2021). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009479
Post Script:
This study shouldn't be mentioned without this other study, where they taught an artificial network how to smell, via Massachusetts Institute of Technology's McGovern Institute for Brain Research: Peter Y. Wang et al, Evolving the olfactory system with machine learning, Neuron (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.09.010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.09.010
Post Post Script:
Might as well put this here, since it has to go somewhere -- what happens when you take an information scientist and give them an olfactory science problem? This is what happens. They come up with an answer that is so simple it just makes you look stupid. This is an example, although not a true example, of the other half of the coming dark ages. After a global pandemic, it's inevitable to experience a kind of dark ages, where lots of people died, but way more people got sick, and also a lot of people retired. That's a post-pandemic-pandemic of institutional knowledge loss, like a collective long covid brain fog on our culture -- we forget how to do stuff, because the guy who did it for the past 30 years isn't doing it anymore. That guy either died, got too sick to work, or retired for a million other reasons, of which many of them could be pandemic-related. And there's lots of those guys (and even more of them gals). Who knows what that will look like for us today or tomorrow, but it's happening as we speak, and years from now we might notice, we might even call it the great forgetting. The flip side to the dark ages is the renaissance, which comes from all the new people in new roles and at new jobs. These people are coming in new, with nobody around to teach them how to do things "right," and although that makes for a bumpy road ahead, it also gets you things like this discovery, one of the hardest problems of olfaction taken on by someone who has not much at all to do with olfaction (although he should, because olfaction has been an information science problem all along).
