Organization of a primitive memory: Olfaction
AUTOR(ES)
de Gennes, P.-G.
FONTE
National Academy of Sciences
RESUMO
I present a tentative, and schematic, picture of the olfaction storage system in early mammalians: (i) how the excitation trains from the olfactory bulb excite selectively N types of cells in the piriform cortex and (ii) how these cells transfer their information to a storage area. Simple size and connectivity requirements impose that each odor is stored in a very small cluster of ≈3 neurons. This surprising result holds even if the model parameters are strongly altered (e.g., if N = 103 rather than 102).
