Sensory Systems

Understanding the principles by which sensory systems represent natural stimuli is one of the holy grails of neuroscience. In the auditory system, the study of the coding of natural sounds has a particular prominence. Indeed, the relationships between neural responses to simple stimuli (usually pure tone bursts)—often used to characterize auditory neurons—and complex sounds (in particular natural sounds) may be complex. Many different classes of natural sounds have been used to study the auditory system. Sound families that researchers have used to good effect in this endeavor include human speech, species-specific vocalizations, an “acoustic biotope” selected in one way or another, and sets of artificial sounds that mimic important features of natural sounds. Peripheral and brainstem representations of natural sounds are relatively well understood. The properties of the peripheral auditory system play a dominant role, and further processing occurs mostly within the frequency channels determined by these properties. At the level of the inferior colliculus, the highest brainstem station, representational complexity increases substantially due to the convergence of multiple processing streams. Undoubtedly, the most explored part of the auditory system, in term of responses to natural sounds, is the primary auditory cortex. In spite of over 50 years of research, there is still no commonly accepted view of the nature of the population code for natural sounds in the auditory cortex. Neurons in the auditory cortex are believed by some to be primarily linear spectro-temporal filters, by others to respond to conjunctions of important sound features, or even to encode perceptual concepts such as “auditory objects.” Whatever the exact mechanism is, many studies consistently report a substantial increase in the variability of the response patterns of cortical neurons to natural sounds. The generation of such variation may be the main contribution of auditory cortex to the coding of natural sounds.

Pain is defined as “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage,” while itch can be defined as “an unpleasant sensation that evokes the desire to scratch.” These sensations are normally elicited by noxious or pruritic stimuli that excite peripheral sensory neurons connected to spinal circuits and ascending pathways involved in sensory discrimination, emotional aversiveness, and respective motor responses. Specialized molecular receptors expressed by cutaneous nerve endings transduce stimuli into action potentials conducted by C- and Aδ-fiber nociceptors and pruriceptors into the outer lamina of the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Here, neurons selectively activated by nociceptors, or by convergent input from nociceptors, pruriceptors, and often mechanoreceptors, transmit signals to ascending spinothalamic and spinoparabrachial pathways. The spinal circuitry for itch requires interneurons expressing gastrin-releasing peptide and its receptor, while spinal pain circuitry involves other excitatory neuropeptides; both itch and pain are transmitted by ascending pathways that express the receptor for substance P. Spinal itch- and pain-transmitting circuitry is segmentally modulated by inhibitory interneurons expressing dynorphin, GABA, and glycine, which mediate the antinociceptive and antipruritic effects of noxious counterstimulation. Spinal circuits are also under descending modulation from the brainstem rostral ventromedial medulla. Opioids like morphine inhibit spinal pain-transmitting circuits segmentally and via descending inhibitory pathways, while having the opposite effect on itch. The supraspinal targets of ascending pain and itch pathways exhibit extensive overlap and include the somatosensory thalamus, parabrachial nucleus, amygdala, periaqueductal gray, and somatosensory, anterior cingulate, insular, and supplementary motor cortical areas. Following tissue injury, enhanced pain is evoked near the injury (primary hyperalgesia) due to release of inflammatory mediators that sensitize nociceptors. Within a larger surrounding area of secondary hyperalgesia, innocuous mechanical stimuli elicit pain (allodynia) due to central sensitization of pain pathways. Pruriceptors can also become sensitized in pathophysiological conditions, such as dermatitis. Under chronic itch conditions, low-threshold tactile stimulation can elicit itch (alloknesis), presumably due to central sensitization of itch pathways, although this has not been extensively studied. There is considerable overlap in pain- and itch-signaling pathways and it remains unclear how these sensations are discriminated. Specificity theory states that itch and pain are separate sensations with their own distinct pathways (“labeled lines”). Selectivity theory is similar but incorporates the observation that pruriceptive neurons are also excited by algogenic stimuli that inhibit spinal itch transmission. In contrast, intensity theory states that itch is signaled by low firing rates, and pain by high firing rates, in a common sensory pathway. Finally, the spatial contrast theory proposes that itch is elicited by focal activation of a few nociceptors while activation of more nociceptors over a larger area elicits pain. There is evidence supporting each theory, and it remains to be determined how the nervous system distinguishes between pain and itch.

The gustatory system has evolved to detect molecules dissolved into the saliva. It is responsible for the perception of taste and flavor, for mediating the interaction between perception and internal homoeostatic states, and for driving ingestive decisions. The widely recognized five basic taste categories (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami) provide information about the nutritional or potentially harmful content in what is being consumed. Sweetness is typical of sugars that are carbohydrate dense; saltiness is the percept of ions which are necessary for physiological function and electrolytic homeostasis; bitterness is associated with alkaloids and other potential toxins; sourness is the percept of acidity signaling spoiling foods; and umami is the sensation associated with amino acids in protein-rich foods. In addition to taste, the act of eating also engages sensations of temperature, texture, and odor—the integration of all these sensations leads to the unitary percept of flavor. These same senses, and others such as vision and audition, are also engaged before an ingestive event. Sights, sounds, and smells can alert organisms to the presence of food as well as inform the organism as to the specifics of which taste(s) to expect. As such, the neurophysiology of taste is necessarily intertwined with that of other senses and with that of cognitive and homeostatic systems.

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), also referred to as “hearing voices,” are vivid perceptions of speech that occur in the absence of any corresponding external stimulus but seem very real to the voice hearer. They are experienced by the majority of people with schizophrenia, less frequently in other psychiatric and neurological conditions, and are relatively rare in the general population. Because antipsychotic medications are not always successful in reducing the severity or frequency of AVH, a better understanding is needed of their neurobiological basis, which may ultimately lead to more precise treatment targets. What voices say and how the voices sound, or their phenomenology, varies widely within and across groups of people who hear them. In help-seeking populations, such as people with schizophrenia, the voices tend to be threatening and menacing, typically spoken in a non-self-voice, often commenting and sometimes commanding the voice hearers to do things they would not otherwise do. In psychotic populations, voices differ from normal inner speech by being unbidden and unintended, co-opting the voice hearer’s attention. In healthy voice-hearing populations, voices are not typically distressing nor disabling, and are sometimes comforting and reassuring. Regardless of content and valence, voices tend to activate some speech and language areas of the brain. Efforts to silence these brain areas with neurostimulation have had mixed success in reducing the frequency and salience of voices. Progress with this treatment approach would likely benefit from more precise anatomical targets and more precisely dosed neurostimulation. Neural mechanisms that may underpin the experience of voices are being actively investigated and include mechanisms enabling context-based predictions and distinctions between experiences coming from self and other. Both these mechanisms can be studied in non-human animal “models” and both can provide new anatomical targets for neurostimulation.

Obstructive sleep apnea is recognized as a heterogeneous disease presenting with varying underlying risk factors, phenotypes, and responses to therapy. This clinical variance is in part due to the complex pathophysiology of sleep apnea. While multiple anatomical issues can predispose to the development of sleep apnea, factors that control the airway musculature also contribute via different pathophysiologic mechanisms. As sleep apnea does not occur during wakefulness, the impact of sleep stages on respiration is of critical importance. Altogether, understanding sleep apnea pathophysiology helps to guide current treatment modalities and helps identify potential targets for future therapies.

Chronic pain lasting months or longer is very common, poorly treated, and sometimes devastating. Nociceptors are sensory neurons that usually are silent unless activated by tissue damage or inflammation. In humans their peripheral activation evokes conscious pain, and their spontaneous activity is highly correlated with spontaneous pain. Persistently hyperactive nociceptors mediate increased responses to normally painful stimuli (hyperalgesia) in chronic conditions and promote the sensitization of central pain pathways that allows low-threshold mechanoreceptors to elicit painful responses to innocuous stimuli (allodynia). Investigations of rodent models of neuropathic pain and hyperalgesic priming have revealed many alterations in nociceptors and associated cells that are implicated in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. These include chronic nociceptor hyperexcitability and spontaneous activity, sprouting, synaptic plasticity, changes in intracellular signaling, and modified responses to opioids, along with alterations in the expression and translation of thousands of genes in nociceptors and closely linked cells.

The perception of odors exerts powerful influences on moods, decisions, and actions. Indeed, odor perception is a major driving force underlying some of the most important human behaviors. How is it that the simple inhalation of airborne molecules can exert such strong effects on complex aspects of human functions? Certainly, just like in the case of vision and audition, the perception of odors is dictated by the ability to transduce environmental information into an electrical “code” for the brain to use. However, the use of that information, including whether or not the information is used at all, is governed strongly by many emotional and cognitive factors, including learning and experiences, as well as states of arousal and attention. Understanding the manners whereby these factors regulate both the perception of odors and how an individual responds to those percepts are paramount for appreciating the orchestration of behavior.

Phantom sensations are experienced by almost every person who has lost their hand in adulthood. This mysterious phenomenon spans the full range of bodily sensations, including the sense of touch, temperature, movement, and even the sense of wetness. For a majority of upper-limb amputees, these sensations will also be at times unpleasant, painful, and for some even excruciating to the point of debilitating, causing a serious clinical problem, termed phantom limb pain (PLP). Considering the sensory organs (the receptors in the skin, muscle or tendon) are physically missing, in order to understand the origins of phantom sensations and pain the potential causes must be studied at the level of the nervous system, and the brain in particular. This raises the question of what happens to a fully developed part of the brain that becomes functionally redundant (e.g. the sensorimotor hand area after arm amputation). Relatedly, what happens to the brain representation of a body part that becomes overused (e.g. the intact hand, on which most amputees heavily rely for completing daily tasks)? Classical studies in animals show that the brain territory in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) that was “freed up” due to input loss (hereafter deprivation) becomes activated by other body part representations, those neighboring the deprived cortex. If neural resources in the deprived hand area get redistributed to facilitate the representation of other body parts following amputation, how does this process relate to persistent phantom sensation arising from the amputated hand? Subsequent work in humans, mostly with noninvasive neuroimaging and brain stimulation techniques, have expanded on the initial observations of cortical remapping in two important ways. First, research with humans allows us to study the perceptual consequence of remapping, particularly with regards to phantom sensations and pain. Second, by considering the various compensatory strategies amputees adopt in order to account for their disability, including overuse of their intact hand and learning to use an artificial limb, use-dependent plasticity can also be studied in amputees, as well as its relationship to deprivation-triggered plasticity. Both of these topics are of great clinical value, as these could inform clinicians how to treat PLP, and how to facilitate rehabilitation and prosthesis usage in particular. Moreover, research in humans provides new insight into the role of remapping and persistent representation in facilitating (or hindering) the realization of emerging technologies for artificial limb devices, with special emphasis on the role of embodiment. Together, this research affords a more comprehensive outlook at the functional consequences of cortical remapping in amputees’ primary sensorimotor cortex.

Color perception in macaque monkeys and humans depends on the visually evoked activity in three cone photoreceptors and on neuronal post-processing of cone signals. Neuronal post-processing of cone signals occurs in two stages in the pathway from retina to the primary visual cortex. The first stage, in in P (midget) ganglion cells in the retina, is a single-opponent subtractive comparison of the cone signals. The single-opponent computation is then sent to neurons in the Parvocellular layers of the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN), the main visual nucleus of the thalamus. The second stage of processing of color-related signals is in the primary visual cortex, V1, where multiple comparisons of the single-opponent signals are made. The diversity of neuronal interactions in V1cortex causes the cortical color cells to be subdivided into classes of single-opponent cells and double-opponent cells. Double-opponent cells have visual properties that can be used to explain most of the phenomenology of color perception of surface colors; they respond best to color edges and spatial patterns of color. Single opponent cells, in retina, LGN, and V1, respond to color modulation over their receptive fields and respond best to color modulation over a large area in the visual field.

Information processing in the auditory system shows considerable adaptive plasticity across different timescales. This ranges from very rapid changes in neuronal response properties—on the order of hundreds of milliseconds when the statistics of sounds vary or seconds to minutes when their behavioral relevance is altered—to more gradual changes that are shaped by experience and learning. Many aspects of auditory processing and perception are sculpted by sensory experience during sensitive or critical periods of development. This developmental plasticity underpins the acquisition of language and musical skills, matches neural representations in the brain to the statistics of the acoustic environment, and enables the neural circuits underlying the ability to localize sound to be calibrated by the acoustic consequences of growth-related changes in the anatomy of the body. Although the length of these critical periods depends on the aspect of auditory processing under consideration, varies across species and brain level, and may be extended by experience and other factors, it is generally accepted that the potential for plasticity declines with age. Nevertheless, a substantial degree of plasticity is exhibited in adulthood. This is important for the acquisition of new perceptual skills; facilitates improvements in the detection or discrimination of fine differences in sound properties; and enables the brain to compensate for changes in inputs, including those resulting from hearing loss. In contrast to the plasticity that shapes the developing brain, perceptual learning normally requires the sound attribute in question to be behaviorally relevant and is driven by practice or training on specific tasks. Progress has recently been made in identifying the brain circuits involved and the role of neuromodulators in controlling plasticity, and an understanding of plasticity in the central auditory system is playing an increasingly important role in the treatment of hearing disorders.

Motion is a key feature of the sensory experience of visual animals. The mammalian retina has evolved a number of diverse motion sensors to detect and parse visual motion into behaviorally relevant neural signals. Extensive work has identified retinal outputs encoding directional and nondirectional motion, and the intermediate circuitry underlying this tuning. Detailed circuit mechanism investigation has established retinal direction selectivity in particular as a model system of neural computation.

Whiskers (vibrissae) are prominent on the snout of many mammals, both terrestrial and aquatic. The defining feature of whiskers is that they are rooted in large follicles with dense sensory innervation, surrounded by doughnut-shaped blood sinuses. Some species, including rats and mice, have elaborate muscular control of their whiskers and explore their environment by making rhythmic back-and-forth “whisking” movements. Whisking movements are purposefully modulated according to specific behavioral goals (“active sensing”). The basic whisking rhythm is controlled by a premotor complex in the intermediate reticular formation. Primary whisker neurons (PWNs), with cell bodies in the trigeminal ganglion, innervate several classes of mechanoreceptive nerve endings in the whisker follicle. Mechanotransduction involving Piezo2 ion channels establishes the fundamental physical signals that the whiskers communicate to the brain. PWN spikes are triggered by mechanical forces associated with both the whisking motion itself and whisker-object contact. Whisking is associated with inertial and muscle contraction forces that drive PWN activity. Whisker-object contact causes whiskers to bend, and PWN activity is driven primarily by the associated rotatory force (“bending moment”). Sensory signals from the PWNs are routed to many parts of the hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain. Parallel ascending pathways transmit information about whisker forces to sensorimotor cortex. At each brainstem, thalamic, and cortical level of these pathways, there are one or more maps of the whisker array, consisting of cell clusters (“barrels” in the primary somatosensory cortex) whose spatial arrangement precisely mirrors that of the whiskers on the snout. However, the overall architecture of the whisker-responsive regions of the brain system is best characterized by multilevel sensory-motor feedback loops. Its intriguing biology, in combination with advantageous properties as a model sensory system, has made the whisker system the platform for seminal insights into brain function.

Naked mole-rats are subterranean mammals that are native to equatorial east Africa including Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya. They are unusual among subterranean mammals in that they live in very large colonies where many respiring animals deplete oxygen and overproduce carbon dioxide. Some of their sensory traits, such as poor vision and hearing, are considered typical of subterranean mammals. However, naked mole-rats display three sensory traits that are unusual even among subterranean mammals. First, they possess a sensitive sensory array of body vibrissae on their otherwise furless bodies. Second, they have a greatly reduced sense of inflammatory and chemical pain, but express acute mechanical and thermal pain. Third, naked mole-rats, and likely other African mole-rat species, are the only rodents known that show no postbirth growth of the vomeronasal organ, an organ associated with sensing pheromones. These sensory traits, along with extreme tolerance to hypoxia and resistance to cancer, make the naked mole-rat an important animal model for studying sensory systems as well as in multiple other scientific fields.

Computational modeling is essential to understand how the complex dendritic structure and membrane properties of a neuron process input signals to generate output signals. Compartmental models describe how inputs, such as synaptic currents, affect a neuron’s membrane potential and produce outputs, such as action potentials, by converting membrane properties into the components of an electrical circuit. The simplest such model consists of a single compartment with a leakage conductance which represents a neuron having spatially uniform membrane potential and a constant conductance summarizing the combined effect of every ion flowing across the neuron’s membrane. The Hodgkin-Huxley model introduces two additional active channels; the sodium channel and the delayed rectifier potassium channel whose associated conductances change depending on the membrane potential and that are described by an additional set of three nonlinear differential equations. Since its conception in 1952, many kinds of active channels have been discovered with a variety of characteristics that can successfully be modeled within the same framework. As the membrane potential varies spatially in a neuron, the next refinement consists in describing a neuron as an electric cable to account for membrane potential attenuation and signal propagation along dendritic or axonal processes. A discrete version of the cable equation results in compartments with possibly different properties, such as different types of ion channels or spatially varying maximum conductances to model changes in channel densities. Branching neural processes such as dendrites can be modeled with the cable equation by considering the junctions of cables with different radii and electrical properties. Single neuron computational models are used to investigate a variety of topics and reveal insights that cannot be evidenced directly by experimental observation. Studies on action potential initiation and on synaptic integration provide prototypical examples illustrating why computational models are essential. Modeling action potential initiation constrains the localization and density of channels required to reproduce experimental observations, while modeling synaptic integration sheds light on the interaction between the morphological and physiological characteristics of dendrites. Finally, reduced compartmental models demonstrate how a simplified morphological structure supplemented by a small number of ion channel-related variables can provide clear explanations about complex intracellular membrane potential dynamics.

Early mammals were small with little neocortex that included a somatosensory system with a mediolateral strip of primary somatosensory cortex and three or four adjoining somatosensory fields. As early mammals radiated out and adapted to local environments, their somatosensory systems adjusted and became specialized in many ways. Most of these specializations were most obvious as disproportionally enlarged representations of important sensory surfaces of the skin in primary somatosensory cortex. These enlarged representations included those of the bill of the duckbilled platypus, the nose of the star-nosed mole, the teeth and tongue of monkeys, the glabrous hand of raccoons, the wing of bats, and the tactile tail of some monkeys. These and other specializations enhanced the ability of these mammals to adapt to their environments and to precisely evaluate relevant sensory events and make appropriate behavioral adjustments.