René Descartes, the famous 17th century French mathematician, philosopher, and physiologist, postulated that all information reaches the brain through the senses. He has since been proven correct: all sensory cues do end up there, arriving as electrical impulses in nerve fibers. But understanding how this happens and how this process can be manipulated is still being decoded.
"At some level, everyone who works on the senses is wrestling with the same question: What is the brain doing to transform the environment into an internal picture of the world?" explains neuroscientist Cori Bargmann, University of California, San Francisco, who studies olfaction in the Caenorhabditis elegans worm. "But researchers are trying to get at that question through different avenues, so we're always comparing and contrasting results from different senses."
The mapped human and mouse genomes, and advances in molecular biology, are catapulting senses research. With these new concepts and tools, scientists can ...
