Lecture 5 – Senses: smell, vision and taste
This week we covered the topics of senses: the taste, the vision and the smell. Olfaction and taste are chemical senses, whereas vision is a physical sense. Third category of senses is mechanical senses. For this week we had a lot of reading which was more time consuming than usual.
The lecture started with talking about Nobel prize winners related to the topic of the day which was very interesting. I think it is always nice when lecturers connect the topic of the lecture to current events. The eyewire game was also fun.
The lecture was rather fast paced, but I still managed to learn a lot from how senses function. To me many of the concepts such as transduction were familiar from having researched biosensors and previous studies. Some interesting facts that stuck with me from the lecture were that some people with XX chromosomes actually have more cone receptors which gives them a superior color vision and that people can train their olfactory senses. The discussion of how people see colours differently was also enlightening.
Additionally, this week there was also a virtual visit to ANI imaging facilities which was interesting but a physical visit would have been nicer. I especially enjoyed the lie detector test demonstration.
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