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.