How to Build a Midbrain

The midbrain consists of many oddly shaped nuclei-forming curves, crescents, and globes, and specialised conglomerates of networks and pathways. Together these structures play a powerful role in our body sense and wellbeing, our self-based memories and emotions, and our vital chemosensory sense (olfaction—smell), cravings, habits, and self-awareness. These structures are uniquely adapted to operate separately and in concert as specialised drive, emotion, body-talk, and body-state hubs that together form our primordial body brain. Importantly, in this chapter we construct our first sensory organ and its receptor systems vital to our perception of the world around us. Through the magical and invisible transduction of odour molecules floating in the air around us, we will create our sense of smell.