"Sensory Processes": Smell, Vision, Taste, Hearing and Touch Receptors and information processing

Brief Reviews on all the sensory processes, a good read!. It is not extensive but for college students and graduate level neuroscience and neurophysiology studies, a good reading material.

Sensory Processes | Boundless Psychology (lumenlearning.com)

The Nose and Nasal Cavity

Olfactory sensitivity is directly proportional to spatial area in the nose—specifically the olfactory epithelium, which is where odorant reception occurs. The area in the nasal cavity near the septum is reserved for the olfactory mucous membrane, where olfactory receptor cells are located. This area is a dime-sized region called the olfactory mucosa. In humans, there are about 10 million olfactory cells, each of which has 350 different receptor types composing the mucous membrane. Each of the 350 receptor types is characteristic of only one odorant type. Each functions using cilia, small hair-like projections that contain olfactory receptor proteins. These proteins carry out the transduction of odorants into electrical signals for neural processing.

Do you Smell: This is the Special Issue of ACS Chemical Senses published at SFN!

For those interested in sensory modalities and the recent developments especially on olfactory system, this topic might of great interest. A special issue on chemical senses published at the Society for neuroscience site.

One of the most extensive research work of mine explores the ability of central nervous pathway "olfactory tract" regeneration following experimentally induced transection (simulation of certain type of traumatic damage), the results have already been published in many reputed journals, a fascinating finding indicating though CNS has limited abilities to regenerate, central tracts like olfactory pathway has enormous regenerative potentials even at the synaptic reorganization levels (Exp Neurol. 1997 Mar;144(1):174-82. Regeneration of the olfactory tract following neonatal lesion in rats. Munirathinam S et al). This special issue mostly covers the advancement in perception of chemical senses by using PET and fMRI imaging studies, a good read to update Olfactory Sense?.

Our knowledge regarding the neural processing of the three chemical senses has been considerably lagging behind that of our other senses. It is only during the last 25 years that significant advances have been made in our understanding of where in the human brain odors, tastants, and trigeminal stimuli are processed. Here, we provide an overview of the current knowledge of how the human brain processes chemical stimuli based on findings in neuroimaging studies using positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Additionally, we provide new insights from recent meta-analyses, on the basis of all published neuroimaging studies of the chemical senses, of where the chemical senses converge in the brain.
http://pubs.acs.org/toc/acncdm/2/1