Date:9/2/2007

apolating what they find to a basic understanding of the much more complex human brain. All animals, from single-celled amoebas to humans, use similar cellular processes to interpret their olfactory environment.

Due to the large-sized nerve cells of invertebrates, we can conveniently and practically examine these systems that are largely the same among all creatures, Mellon says. And antennule flicking can serve as a practical model that helps us understand how two or more senses work together in the brain. Mellon has been investigating sensory systems for half a century, since his grad school days at Johns Hopkins University. Hes still learning. We can say we know that animals use their senses to make maps of their environment that direct their behaviors, he says.

Recently Mellon perused the research in the field his own and that of many other scientists of the past 45 years or so and has published a review of the literature in the August 2007 issue of The Biological Bulletin. What hes found is that there is still a lot not understood. Its fertile ground for ongoing research, he said. The size of an area of the brain devoted to a particular sense gives us a good idea of how an animal perceives the world. It provides insight as to how the world is interpreted by that animal.

About 40 percent of a crustaceans brain is devoted to the sense of smell. This shows how important detecting odors is to the animal, Mellon says. Crayfish and lobsters are generally solitary creatures, inhabiting an aquatic environment that is often dark, and they need that highly acute sense of smell. Humans, by contrast, have a very small portion of the brain devoted to interpreting smells, less than one percent by volume. But about 30 percent of the human brain is concerned with visual processing, interpreting images from the eye, Mellon says. As social animals, humans rely heavily on sight and color for identifying food, as well as friends and foe.

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Contact: Fariss Samarrai samarrai@virginia.edu 434-924-3778 University of Virginia Source:Eurekalert

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