Gilles Laurent: The Sense of Smell: A Window into the Brain and Memory

This event was digitally recorded and is available for viewing on the Caltech Theater site.

Smell is, together with its cousin taste, probably the least well understood of our senses. Yet smells are the sensations we most vividly associate with memory and emotions. Thanks in great part to recent molecular discoveries, much of the beautifully ordered anatomy of olfactory circuits has recently been solved. Parallel efforts to understand the physiology of olfaction reveal subtle distributed processes, seemingly well adapted to dealing with the complexity of odor signals. Laurent will summarize some of these recent advances and show how these old brain circuits may help us understand the neuronal nature of memories.

Gilles Laurent is the Lawrence A. Hanson Jr. Professor of Biology and Computation and Neural Systems.

MORE INFO

Add to My Calendar