ABOVE: Distribution of the neurons responding to five gustatory stimuli (S: sucrose, N: NaCl, CA: citric acid, Q: quinine, W: water)
KE CHEN, JOSHUA F. KOGAN, AND ALFREDO FONTANINI
The paper
K. Chen et al., “Spatially distributed representation of taste quality in the gustatory insular cortex of behaving mice,” Curr Biol, 31:247–256.e4, 2020.
Sensory information is often mapped onto the brain in a physical sense. The most famous case is that of the cortical homunculus, which depicts how representations of sensations of touch in the somatosensory cortex are spatially distributed according to where on the body touch was felt. Similar patterns of neurological organization can be found in the visual and auditory cortices, which map to locations in the visual field and in the cochlea, respectively. Smell does not follow any such organizational rules, however, and according to a new study of mice, neither does taste.
While a 2011 study from the ...
