How experience shapes the way we sense the world.

The olfactory system

All of the senses are of interest to us, but we primarily use smell—the olfactory system—for our experiments. Human smell is excellent and impactful; the idea that humans have a poor sense of smell is a 19th-century myth (McGann, 2017).

In mouse models, brain circuits that represent odors are scientifically accessible in ways that visual and auditory circuits are not. We can observe the mouse brain light up in patterns that tell us which odor is being smelled, and then see those patterns change as the mouse learns what the odor means.

Smell, learning, and health

In experiments with human participants, we explore how olfactory perception is altered by learning and by health-related factors such as anxiety and vape use (Rosenthal et al., 2022).

Fear and sensory processing

Anxiety and traumatic experiences can alter sensory processing in the brain in ways that are poorly understood. When a mouse learns that an odor actually or potentially predicts a bad experience, that information is built into the brain’s representation of the odor from the earliest stage where signals enter the brain from the nose (Kass et al., 2013).

These changes seem to reflect not only the mouse’s experiences but also the conclusions it draws. If fear generalizes to new odors, the brain’s processing of those odors is altered too. By artificially changing early odor representations, we can cause a mouse to overgeneralize fear to new odors (Bakir et al., 2026). This shows that changes in neurosensory processing after fear learning can cause changes in fear generalization across stimuli and situations.

We are currently exploring how these brain circuits work and whether the changes can be reversible (Rosenthal et al., 2026).