What is it about?
A nerve network lies beneath the chemosensory oral veil used by the predatory sea slug Pleurobranchaea to track prey. It computes both the incentive and likely direction of an odor source and sends the information to the feeding motor network and the turning motor network, respectively. These functions, and its partially dopaminergic nature, resemble the those of the olfactory bulb and cortex of vertebrates. This suggests that the soft-bodied, invertebrate common ancestor may have had a similiar subepithelial olfactory network that became more complex and centralized into the brain to express incentive and directionality in arthropods and vertebrates.
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Why is it important?
The subepithelial network resembles the olfactory bulb and cortex of vertebrates in computing stimulus incentive and location, and in its partially dopaminergic nature. Evolutionary centralization of its computational functions in the ancestor’s descendants may have led to the vertebrates' olfaction-derived pallial forebrains and their analogs in arthropods and annelids.
Perspectives
The basic functions of the vertebrate forebrain deal with the questions, “What is it?”, “Where is it?”, “How do I like it?”, and “What should I do?”. These are the computations that are treated continuously in conscious feelings and abstract thought. They are the same general computations treated by Pleurobranchaea's subepithelial network, only in much less detail. Even simpler motile life forms must deal with these questions and likely in similar computations. The origins of subjective experience may lie closer to the beginning of life than widely appreciated.
Rhanor Gillette
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A peripheral subepithelial network for chemotactile processing in the predatory sea slug Pleurobranchaea californica, PLOS One, February 2024, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0296872.
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