Analysis and Modelling of Response Features of Accessory Olfactory Bulb Neurons - Yoram Ben-Shaul
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Is this working is someone here?
I am here now… but probably not for long
Ah ok, sorry missed all but the end of the talk, but sounded interesting. Assume you know about the largely unpublished work we did years ago looking at human perceptual responses to odors that suggested that a great deal of the perception of odors was likely based on a ‘grounding’ provided by prior knowledge of the metabolic structure of the world?
In other words, that the olfactory recognition process is not a ‘de-novo’ deep knowledge of the olfactory task?
No, I do not know about this largely unpublished work and would love to know more about it.
Noam Sobel at the Weisman Institute is familiar with this data and idea. It completely changes the computational analysis of neuronal olfactory data, I believe.
yes, was not publishable because so far outside the range of thinking about olfaction. Christian Metzner, who hosted this session is also familiar with this work. If you search for the Thesis of Chris Chee at Caltech, you will find the work.
email me bowerj@sou.edu and I can send you some links to some of this. There are a couple of published papers, not on the overall effort, but on some pieces of it. You might find it interesting
I haven’t talked with Noam about this data, but there are definitely points of interaction with his work. The grounding based on metabolic knowledge is a very nice idea. Any ideas on how this knowledge is represented?
yes, another piece of important but unpublished work on modeling the olfactory cortex suggests strongly that the representation is in the pattern of connections within cortex. While PC connectivity is often described as space and random, modeling work by Michael Vanier (again a largely unpublished thesis) suggests that there is, in fact, a fine and specific structure of interconnectivity between different neurons. It is a very interesting analysis, in a 700 page long thesis
The interconnectivity is highly distributed, thus the appearance of random, but it must be there in order to account for the pattern of cortical activity induced by shocking the LAT - work that, as you may know, we spent many years doing.
I would be very happy, at some point, to set up a zoom meeting to show you the data and the interpretation - given your work, I think you would find it interesting.
You meant LOT right? I will email you definitely. And would love to Zoom about this. Thanks! I have to go offline for a while now.
yes LOT - sorry lateral olfactory tract