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Advanced Science Topics and Thought

Generalfox.com

Introduction

In the public eye the brain is still not very well understood, and through my research I’ve noticed that government and private funded research is far more advanced than the general public is aware. There are a lot of patents held by a lot of larger companies – everything from improving vision to assessing mental states. Most people are generally aware that the body generates electrical signals, but did you know that it also uses them as a basis for ‘inner-body’ communications (i.e. a way for organs to communicate with the brain). If you had a lot of time, I’d suggest you read “The Body Electric” by Robert Becker and Gary Selden. The book outlines how cells, the nervous system, and the brain work electrically.

Perhaps over-simplifying the above mentioned book, I’ll suggest that the body is like a large electrical circuit board, using the nervous system as a conduit for the organs, brain, and etc., to communicate with one another via electrical signals. As an example, here is an article describing how the body converts a mechanical input (sound pressure) into what we understand to be ‘sound’. The article is summarized by: sounds enter the ear as sound waves (pressure), creating vibrations on our eardrum, which are converted into electrical signals that travel up the auditory nerve to the brain’s auditory cortex, which are then interpreted into something we recognize and understand as ‘sound’.

What Does The Nervous System Do And How Does It Work?

Wikipedia

The nervous system interconnects the brain and organs in the body and allows them to communicate with one another. In a very basic sense, the nervous system is the “wires” that transmit electrical signals throughout the body. All of our senses are relayed through the nervous system. For instance, the sensations of ‘touch’ and ‘pain‘ are relayed for interpretation by the brain. If we touch something cold with our finger, then the nervous system would ‘conduct’ the appropriate signals to the brain, which would interpret it as having touched something cold – which after further processing by the brain might drive some sort of response. Although there are many different nerves in the body, sometimes a single nerve will connect up many different organs together.  To ensure the brain ‘knows’ which organ sent the signal, each organ in the body operates at a different frequency. Here is a great article describing how the electrical impulses are generated and how the nervous system ‘conducts’ these signals.

The nervous system also acts like a ‘translator’. It was once thought that the brain controlled every single motion and movement made in the body – however there are cells in the spinal column that translate messages between the brain and the motor neurons (which directly control muscles).  This collection of cells is called the locomotor central pattern generator (CPG). Without the CPG the brain would need to perform a lot of processing when you walked down the street – controlling each muscle movement while alternating each step and balancing (arm swinging, etc.). But these operations are instead ‘learned’ by the CPG, so all the brain needs to do is send the CPG a signal that it should walk (or run, etc.) and the CPG will perform all of the necessary learned actions – raising the brains efficiency as it can now work on other tasks.

But this idea is not restricted to the CPG, it seems that the heart also has a grouping of neurons. In addition to sending messages to the brain using the nervous system, these approximately 40,000 neurons can also sense, feel, learn and even remember! Here is an article advising how the heart has its own little ‘brain’. As the heart can detect and react to emotional stress, feelings of happiness, and other emotions, we are therefore able to detect a person’s emotional state simply by reading the electrical signals generated by the heart. The heart is also a major contributor to the human biofield, generating electromagnetic signals significantly stronger than those of the brain!

It is interesting to note that some metabolic processes are controlled by the nervous system. A bit more detail about the design and functioning of the nervous system can be found here. And here is a slide show created by WebMD, describing how the nervous system works in even more detail.

What Does The Brain Do?

Photo by Natasha Connell on Unsplash

We all know that the brain allows us to think, learn, navigate, rationalize, fantasize, dream, feel emotions, quantify fear, etc. etc.. Perhaps the core functioning of the brain could be summed up with the statement, “it processes any signals it receives and determines a response”. The brain is the command center for the human nervous system – it regulates your bodily functions. The brain is also directly connected to the immune system (another article here, and here). Therefore your overall health would have a direct effect on your brain – here is a study where they found that physically fit kids have bigger hippocampus than those who are less active. So I’ll suggest that you take care of your physical health – and stay fit!

What Are Neurons, Synapses, Nerual Networks, and Bio-Photons?

Neurons, Synapses, and Neural Networks

The brain uses electrically excitable cells called “neurons” that process and transmit information through electrical and chemical signals.  There are several types of specialized neurons:

  • sensory neurons respond to stimuli such as touch, sound, or light
  • motor neurons receive signals from the brain and spinal cord to cause muscle contractions and affect glandular outputs
  • inter-neurons which connect neurons to others within the same region of the brain or spinal cord

“Synapses” connect neurons together and conduct the signals that are generated. Neurons connect together to from “Neural Networks”. Here is an interesting article helping us to understand how the neurons in our brains are interconnected – shedding light into just how interconnected the information that is stored in the brain is. Here is an article detailing what neurons are and how they work.

Neurons can learn temporal patterns – for example when a signal (pulse – brief pause – pulse – long pause – pulse) was provided to neurons found in the cerebellum (an area in the brain that controls bodily movements, position, and balance), it was responded to with “response – brief pause – response – long pause – response”.  This means that the brain is capable of learning in different ways than we prior thought possible! As a side note I wonder how this additional input would have influenced the brain?

Bio-photons

In recent years, a growing body of evidence shows that photons play an important role in the basic functioning of cells.  It turns out that many cells emit light as they work, and use this to communicate.  Here is an article that supports the idea that neurons in our brains are capable of producing photons (bio-photons). It is believed that photons are conducted through microtubles, which are the internal scaffolding inside the cells that provide structural support and allow the movement of cellular material. Bio-photons appear within the visible spectrum, from near-infrared through violet. Bio-photons are created during the electrical activity of the brain, and it is now believed that they are used to help co-ordinate activities in different parts of the brain (another article here).

How Does Memory Work?

Memory plays an important role in our every day life, sometimes in ways that we may not be consciously aware of, such as performing the awake mental replay of past experiences, which is critical for learning and making informed choices. While we have known for years that information is stored in two main memory areas in the brain (the hippocampus [short term memory] and the neocortex [long term memory]), we only recently learned the technique the brain uses to preserve its memories – how the brain codes episodic memory. And how the brain reconstructs prior events. And how the brain transfers our daily experiences into memory or discards them while we sleep (this includes subconscious subliminal messages). Scientists have also discovered the circuit that is dedicated to memory retrieval.

One of the more interesting recent discovery is one that contradicts the general understanding that the area the brain stores memory is a rigid structure. This new study shows that the brain has a ‘critical plasticity’ in its neuronal networks that ensures easier integration of new information. This plasticity allows neuronal networks to more easily incorporate new learning and eliminates the need to form new links to separate neurons every time something is stored in the brain. As well, once a memory is no longer needed, neurons can be more easily reassigned to other important tasks. The authors state, “We believe this trade-off ensures the delicate balance between the ability to incorporate new information while preserving old memories”.

Just how much memory do we have? Well, it is estimated that the brain can hold about a petabyte of data!

Mapping the Brain

I found a Ted Talks video where Allan Jones describes how the brain works by describing it as a giant map, and shows us how the electrical activity “adds up”. Different sections of the brain perform specific operations, and as our technologies allow for more detail in our studies, we are fine-tuning our understanding of the functions of these various brain regions.  As an example, our understanding of language comprehension was based on a 140 year old study performed on individuals having had a stroke (the studies focused on Wernicke’s region in the brain).  A more recent study identified that word comprehension is located in a region of the brain located more forward than Wernicke’s region, and that sentence comprehension is widely distributed throughout the language network.  Thus, a new atlas is being generated to help describe how these various areas of the brain work together.  Researchers running a project called, “Human Connectrome Project”, were able to create an updated brain map that is based on the brain activity of over 200 participants.  Published article here.  Cool video here.  More information can be found in this National Geographic Live video called, “Mapping the Brain“.

Researchers have also been able to read postmortem brain slices to determine how a rat had been trained to behave in response to specific sounds! Their work provides one of the first examples of how specific changes in the activity of individual neurons encode particular acts of learning and memory in the brain.

For those interested, here are some interesting brain facts: