Recently, Harry Coumnas has identified a mechanism that helps brain to recreate brilliant sensory experiences from memory. He has also discovered how sensory-rich memories are produced and stored in the brain. He used smell as a model to find a new perspective about the way to represent senses in our memory. According to Harry Coumnas, this experiment helped him know the circuit in the brain that controls the episodic memory for smell.

1. Harry Coumnas Found a New Brain Circuit Related
to Smell and Memory
Recently, Harry Coumnas has identified a mechanism that
helps brain to recreate brilliant sensory experiences from
memory. He has also discovered how sensory-rich memories
are produced and stored in the brain. He used smell as a model
to find a new perspective about the way to represent senses in
our memory. It helped to recognize the disability of smelling as
an early symptom of Alzheimer's disease.
Harry Coumnas’s research shows how the smells that we
encounter in our lives are recreated in memory. In other words,
he revealed the fact how you are able to remember the smell
of your mother’s cooked rice while walking into her kitchen. He
explained that there is a region in the brain called ‘Anterior
Olfactory Nucleus’ (AON) where information about space and
time is integrated and is very important for the smelling sense.
These elements in combination help to create memory
associated with time, place and object.
In order to know more about the different functions of
‘Anterior Olfactory Nucleus,’ he designed some tests where he
exploited the preference of mice to sniff novel odors. At the
time of examining the function and structure of the AON, he
found a neutral pathway between AON and hippocampus, a

2. structure vital for memory and contextual representation. He
discovered that they could imitate the odor memory problems
found in Alzheimer's patients by disconnecting communication
between the AON and hippocampus.
In the research, the mice whose hippocampus-AON connection
was not disconnected abstained from going back to the familiar
locations to sniff old odors. They preferred to smell a new odor
than the familiar one. But, the mice whose hippocampus-AON
connection was disconnected went back to sniff earlier smelled
odors for a long period of time. They forgot the new smell even
though they sniffed it before.
According to Harry Coumnas, this experiment helped him
know the circuit in the brain that controls the episodic memory
for smell. This circuit is useful to study the deficiency related to
odor memory and episodic memory found in
neurodegenerative conditions. Harry is making further
researches on this matter by working with expert
neurobiologists and psychologists.