Matt Smear
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mattsmear.bsky.social
Matt Smear
@mattsmear.bsky.social
Associate professor, University of Oregon
Follows your nose
Octopus track chemosensory plumes to find food

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
October 11, 2025 at 5:44 PM
“Instead of a joker to occasionally confuse the student of behavior, nonsensory activities appear in every fall of the cards and must make up a large share of the deck. Neurophysiologically, it may even become a problem to account for any consistent effect of a specific stimulus."
Donald Hebb (1949)
September 4, 2025 at 7:13 PM
August 27, 2025 at 2:26 AM
June 7, 2025 at 5:57 AM
May 9, 2025 at 1:37 AM
Congrats Michael. I'm putting Supp Video 2 on the title slide for my 1st day of class today 😍🪰🧠
April 1, 2025 at 4:30 PM
March 12, 2025 at 1:46 AM
👃💭👅
January 27, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Harvey encouraged his fellow physicians ‘to search and study out the secrets of nature by way of experiment’.

Can we use ‘study out’ instead of ‘interrogate’ or ‘determine’ from now on? Who’s with me?

👃💭🧪

history.rcp.ac.uk/exhibitions/...
January 19, 2025 at 2:32 AM
32 oz
January 18, 2025 at 2:13 PM
January 16, 2025 at 7:54 PM
👃💭👀🦻☝️🤔
January 12, 2025 at 1:40 AM
the 4-handed old-timey camcorder man is
December 12, 2024 at 12:38 AM
A decoder model can read out a mouse's place from population activity in olfactory bulb, again similarly to hippocampal populations in the same conditions.
November 22, 2024 at 6:32 PM
In addition, the olfactory bulb encodes "place", the mouse's location in its environment. Individual neurons show significant variation in their firing as a function of place, comparable to the selectivity of hippocampal neurons recorded in the same conditions.
November 22, 2024 at 6:26 PM
At the single neuron level, the stateful structure of the population dynamics can be explained by the fact that many individual neurons vary their firing rates with the animal's sniff frequency. We display this selectivity with "Sniff fields" (SnFs) that describe how neurons track breathing rhythms.
November 22, 2024 at 6:23 PM
This states of this model synchronized with stateful structure in the olfactory bulb population dynamics
November 22, 2024 at 6:18 PM
Even in this unstructured condition, the movement and sniffing of the mice was highly structured. We described this structure with a hidden markov model
November 22, 2024 at 6:14 PM
Sniffing helps animals identify smells and connect them to places and events, but noses can’t sense time or place.

How do brains connect odors with internal models of the world?

Our preprint suggests that the olfactory bulb participates in this connection.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 22, 2024 at 6:07 PM
“3D segmentation of rhinarial tissues from volumetric light-sheet microscopy images of dog rhinaria”
👃💭😍
November 21, 2024 at 2:59 AM
September 29, 2024 at 1:30 AM
September 29, 2024 at 1:29 AM
September 24, 2024 at 3:43 PM
August 21, 2024 at 10:58 PM
June 6, 2024 at 10:31 PM