The recent study by Prof. Uchida’s group in the rat olfactory system provides evidence that such patterns could help mammals to identify and discriminate odors, and in turn to determine behavior and decisions. Unraveling how this neural coding mechanism works can provide insight into how other animals, including humans, make complex decisions governing behavior.

The understanding of the olfactory neural circuit will yield insights into what goes wrong in olfactory disorders. These insights into the nervous system could be applied to the future development of small molecules and other therapeutics to treat such diseases and conditions.

The brain has the ability to rapidly and accurately recognize and react to complex phenomena. It is generally thought that neurons have much slower operational speeds than transistors, but the most sophisticated computer algorithms cannot accomplish such seemingly easy tasks with any comparable speed and accuracy, suggesting that the brain has specific algorithms to solve this problem. Therefore, the study of how odor information is encoded and transformed by the neural circuit during rapid decisions could lead to new knowledge of brain/mental algorithms, which could be applied to advance computer technology.

• Investigating the mechanism by which odor information is coded and processed by an ensemble of neurons.
• Studying the neuronal processes by which sensory information and memory from previous experiences guide the behavior of an animal, and elucidating the circuit dynamics that underlie decision-making processes.
• Exploring learning mechanisms based on rewards and punishments.

• Odor-guided perceptual decision task  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFajwVRMOAs
• Reward-based learning and decision making assays
• Multi-electrode recording
• Tetrodes
• Neuronal recordings
• Olfactometer
• Molecular and genetic tools

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/the-nose-knows/

The brain has the ability to recognize and react to complex input with remarkable speed and accuracy. The neural mechanism underlying rapid perceptual decisions remains an outstanding challenge in neuroscience. Clues to how this may work can be found in the olfactory system, as animals exhibit a remarkable capacity to identify and respond to odors in just a fraction of a second. In fact, a study by Prof. Uchida and his colleagues demonstrated that a single sniff cycle, lasting about 150 milliseconds, is sufficient for high performance odor identification. Prof. Uchida’s laboratory has developed an odor-guided perceptual decision task in rats and mice, and by recording the activity of individual neurons using a multi-electrode recording technique in the olfactory bulb (OB) and the piriform cortex (PC) while an animal is awake and actively engaged in the olfactory perceptual decision task, they discovered that the brain uses the specific timing or patterning of action potentials, or a "temporal code", to represent different odors. This code may allow the brain to represent a larger repertoire of stimuli in a shorter amount of time. By combining behavioral approaches and molecular and genetic tools, the Uchida lab is working towards establishing a causal link between the activity of specific neuronal circuits and the dynamics of behavior and learning.

Biological Mechanisms and Pathways

• Dopamine
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Central Nervous System

• Action potential •
• Addiction •
• Behavior •
• Decision •
• Dopamine •
• Learning •
• Neural coding •
• Neuronal recordings •
• Odor •
• Odor-guided perceptual decision task •
• Olfactory •
• Reward •
• Reward-based decision making and learning •
• Reward-based learning and decision-making assays •
• Spikes •
• Temporal code
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Disease Mechanisms

• Addiction
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Research Tools and Instrumentation

• Neuronal recordings •
• Neuronal recordings •
• Odor-guided perceptual decision task •
• Reward-based decision making and learning •
• Reward-based learning and decision-making assays
•