Neuroscientist @Harvard asking how the brain intertwines sensation and action to facilitate cognition. Scents, circuits, behavior, machine learning.
Dec 21, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
COVID causes long-term smell loss in some patients and we don’t know why. We’ve got some initial answers in this great collab between @goldstein_brad (led by the twitterless John Findlay) and us (w/@davidhbrann, @TatsuyaTsuka0) bit.ly/3WjY4U0
First, a recap. After COVID infection (especially with the early variants) many/most folks lost their sense of smell – for most it was transient (days-weeks) but for some others much longer (months-years). So how does SARS-CoV-2 actually attack your sense of smell?
Dec 7, 2021 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
Olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) use transcription to make flexible predictions about the environment and dynamically change odor responses, now in our new paper led by the amazing @TatsuyaTsuka0 and @davidhbrann! Thread about what we found 👉1/n bit.ly/3pGvY6u
Mammalian OSNs are thought to more or less faithfully tell the brain about what they are detecting via their odor receptors (OR), suggesting that the brain is largely responsible for sorting novel, salient cues from predictable background signals 2/n
