The Chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Dr. Dan Wesson, currently studies the neural processing of sensory information in the context of behavior. What does this mean? It means he studies how the brain receives, interprets and transmits information that leads to how we act based on the senses. Specifically, his research is based on olfaction, which is the sense of smell. In college, Dr. Wesson had become interested in what influences decision-making and emotions. Once he started diving into that, he started thinking about how subconscious information that we experience may influence our emotions in ways that we haven’t discovered yet. This led to diving deeper into the world of olfaction, which is the most subconscious information one can receive and is heavily linked to memory. Wanting the answers to the questions he had on this topic, Dr. Wesson started to study neuroscience and neuropharmacology.
According to Dr. Wesson, the impact of research is something that will probably be assessed hundreds of years from now, however, the research from his lab that might be the most impactful is discovering a new form of animal communication. When the Wesson lab first started, wireless sensors were created to implant in the noses of rodents to isolate the sniffing behavior and track how animals sniff each other. This was the first time anyone has recorded this type of behavior. The results of this study were that animals use the act of sniffing as a conflict avoidance signal. Normally, the more dominant animal will sniff rapidly and if the more submissive animal does not reduce their sniffing speed, they will likely get attacked. This study showed that the matter of odor did not matter in this situation but just the way the animals sniffed each other was another form of communication.
In the Wesson lab, Dr. Wesson and his students study brain circuits that are important for influencing emotions and making decisions. According to Dr. Wesson, the most informative and decisive circuits in your brain are those that allow you to experience sensory information. You need two types of reception, interior and exterior, to have the ability to perceive anything. The work done in the Wesson lab uses modern methods to manipulate these brain circuits to test questions such as “How do they contribute to learning, perception and decision-making?”. With such methods, the lab can eventually find answers to questions about the causal relationship between brain circuits and complex behavior/emotion.