Circuitry of Olfactory Information Storage

Circuitry of Olfactory Information Storage

Afif Aqrabawi
Susumu Tonegawa Laboratory

MIT Department of Biology, MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory

To understand the organization of knowledge, one must first study the brain’s machinery for memory. Memories are the building blocks of what we know. As the poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück writes, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory”.

This captured image represents a natural ‘blueprint’ of that underlying machinery. It was taken as part of a large-scale, systematic, and rigorous approach to resolve the prominent question of knowledge representation. The blue fluorescence highlights the brain circuitry which enables olfactory (smell) memory.

top view of a brain in purple, with cyan-marked regions at the top of the image

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