“This may not seem surprising to most of us, but it has puzzled neuroscientists for decades. Given that the brain is the most powerful computing device known, how can it perform so well even though the behaviour of its circuits is variable?
A long-standing hypothesis is that the brain’s circuitry actually is reliable – and the apparently high variability is because your brain is engaged in many tasks simultaneously, which affect each other.
It is this hypothesis that the researchers at UCL tested directly. The team – a collaboration between experimentalists at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research and a theorist, Peter Latham, at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit – took inspiration from the celebrated butterfly effect – from the fact that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. Their idea was to introduce a small perturbation into the brain, the neural equivalent of butterfly wings, and ask what would happen to the activity in the circuit. Would the perturbation grow and have a knock-on effect, thus affecting the rest of the brain, or immediately die out?
It turned out to have a huge knock-on effect. The perturbation was a single extra ‘spike’, or nerve impulse, introduced to a single neuron in the brain of a rat. That single extra spike caused about thirty new extra spikes in nearby neurons in the brain, most of which caused another thirty extra spikes, and so on. This may not seem like much, given that the brain produces millions of spikes every second. However, the researchers estimated that eventually, that one extra spike affected millions of neurons in the brain.”
Read more at PhysOrg.com
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First I and my 4 kids and wife know you are an alien and we welcome you to planet Earth
Second – where do you find the time.
Third to this post
This helps me encourage my kids (and indeed clients) to value every little bit of stiumuliusl ife can through at you as YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE IT MIGHT LEAD
combine
this entirely intuitive result
with the less intuitive discovery that we are all in some way synethsthetic (i love the Boo Bah Kiki test)
Steve Job’s point (“3 lessons from my life” given to Princeton I take) ” you can only join the dots up in hindsight” and you get a pretty good reason to value even the little things as they will butterfly into bigger ones,make unexpected connections & create value for you at some time if you allow them too
Thanks 4 your generous mind
Graham
the original fuzzy logic!
But is there a point when the brain reognises this isn’t usual and calls a halt to the spiralling effect? Or at least attempts to? Or are we basically ‘logical machines’ which respond according to programming input? Don’t we have some sort of cut off when the synergy goes awry?
I once again refer to autism, it being a favourite interest of mine…
Many people with autism have difficulty managing or interpreting their senses, which at times become overloaded and can cause what is known as fragmentation or other forms of distortion or synaesthesia. It is like throwing a lot of stones into a pool and trying to look at every ripple, as opposed to the pool as a whole.
Neurotypical individuals seem to have an override mechanism, which allows us to see the whole picture.
Referring to the neurological model mentioned above – if every sensory input had unlimited ‘ripples’, we would be confused, as is sometimes experienced by those on the autistic spectrum.
Some of us must have a method of calming the system to prevent a network overload.
What i wonder is how they introduce a single extra ‘spike’, or nerve impulse, to a single neuron…
I wonder if it is through magnet or electrical inpulse input…
Ta Rob. x
You’re very welcome JK.
A combination of basic science, autism training and some theoretical supposition. Not really very scientific, but perception and cognition are keen interests of mine.