Our Mind-Boggling Sense of Smell
You might say the brain is our most photogenic organ. We are, thanks to modern neuroimaging, living amid an explosion of brain data. Just consider: We can zoom into the brain’s connectivity to the most minute, molecular level. We can trace individual cells as well as entire cell populations. We can turn neurons on and off just like a light switch. We can even genetically engineer our way through an animal’s memory traces, to play with its behavior. And yet, even with these powers, the way the brain ultimately works eludes us. Some neuroscientists are tempted to see this as an existential crisis for the field.
Still, I wouldn’t say neuroscience is in a crisis. It only seems that way because too much of neuroscience has focused on favorite theories derived from a few pet systems. And this has limited the field’s outlook, quite literally. Take the paradigmatic case of vision. Most of 20th-century brain research has been built on our understanding of how we see. This wasn’t an accident.
What if we broadened our theories to include the workings of less popular parts of the brain?
The captivating beauty of the visual system is its apparent display of logic. The visual system gives us specialized areas in the brain that create and process our perception of particular sensory features. These This brain-map principle was found in other senses, too, including audition. Tonal frequencies line up in the auditory cortex, similar to the keys of a piano.
