How the hell do brains work?!

6syqzc.jpg
 
Rroff said:
Its all a sequence of chemical reactions... think we have free will... think again.
Click to expand...

Sodium and Potassium ions that migrate back and forward through special openings in the cell wall. The ions are what you see as 'electricity'. The interesting bit is the locomotion of the wave as there's a simple state machine at each opening which pauses before allowing the ions to return. Now if the you placed a load of these ions on a flat plane and triggered a 'spike' then you'd get the the ions causing the openings next to them to cause a spike, and so on. So on a flat plane the effect would be like a water ripple circulating outwards. After a delay the spike drops away and the centre of the ripple turns to normal..
So how you dies it go along the nerve in a direction only? This is the interesting bit that could only occur because the nerve is a tube.. The spike starts at one end and the ripple moves up the tube driven because of the delay lock prevents the spike from going backwards. so the voltage potential spike moves forward in a mexican wave. After the delay has reset the gate, the opening is ready to be part of the next nerve pulse (mexican wave).

The fun part is that there are areas that are defined as "junk" which are now turning out to be part of the process, such as longer term thinking through axions without mylene sheaths (which case the nerve pulse to speed up) that hook up to the same synaptic gaps.

All interesting stuff, there's also the generic area - when the brain develops from DNA it's architecture is governed by the DNA hence you have folds in the brain for example. Those folds allow the are of the brain to be increased but allow the brain's input/output for that area to be close to one another (fold a piece of A4 and hold the top of the paper with the bend at the bottom - that's I/O at the top and the "thinking bit" looped to take up less space).

If you think of the brain taking information as if it were a stream of water, splitting that stream of information then processing it all in parallel then that gives you an idea of how much data it really is processing at one time. For example - it knows how to track changes at different rates that occur so you can see that two balls are rotating and that one is going faster than the other.

I'm convinced that the "thinking" is a feedback loop operating at a certain speed governed by a set of nerve impulses going around in a loop of nerves the cycle then drives other parts of the brain based on inputs.
This causes "abstract" impulses that have no real purpose with direct input and output but cause a difference in behaviour between repeated inputs and their respective outputs.
That to me scaled up then becomes a personality.
 
sanaxe1 said:
What happened if for some crazy reason , the Spinal Chord began making up more commands then just your basic *quickly move hand something is hot* to Need to Survive at all costs , and an epic battle beteen the Spinal chord and the brain was to begin.
Click to expand...

You mean like when someone has a fit?

Nitefly - Does the spinal cord store information? You said about if you touch something hot then message goes to spinal cord but not the brain.

Interesting thread. 5 star
 
A reflex arc is the neural pathway that mediates a reflex action. In higher animals, most sensory neurons do not pass directly into the brain, but synapse in the spinal cord. This characteristic allows reflex actions to occur relatively quickly by activating spinal motor neurons without the delay of routing signals through the brain, although the brain will receive sensory input while the reflex action occurs. The main source of the reflex action is through the bottom muscles.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc - Duran Duran
 
Biohazard said:
Can you keep writing on this please? :)
Click to expand...

Well, my books and notes on all of this are currently gathering dust in a far away attic - expanding much further on what I have already described will see me stepping way outside of my current comfort zone! However, I can at least try to entertain by providing some trivia which might be of interest.

The reflex response that animals have is all about minimising response time to avoid harm. Fish (the teleosts, that's the bony fish, at least) have a system called the 'lateral line' system which helps them avoid predators. In summary, when predators dart towards a fish, they cause micro-ripples of water that fish detect using special cells on their surface. This causes impulses to ping back to the spinal cord, causing the fish to almost instantly jerk in the opposite direction. If you have ever seen big schools of fish jerk synchronously watching David Attenborough, this is probably what is going on. The whole point is that this allows fish to react more than 10x faster to predators than if they saw them, and thought to move away as a result.

Many different animals can use nerves and electrical impulses to sense different things to humans altogether. Perhaps the most fascinating example, in my eyes, is the ability of the elasmobranchs (the sharks, rays and skates) to actually detect electrical impulses in other animals (!!!) to hunt. These have unique cells called the Ampullae of Lorenzini that pick up feint differences in electrical charge, allowing them to hunt prey deep in the sand (I have dissected an entire stingray to observe this special system, it really is quite incredible - a stingray is essentially a giant metal detector). This was initially discovered by an interesting series of experiments with dogfish - the dogfish could keep finding the live fish until it was hidden in a solid lead container. It follows that these incredible animals truly do have a sixth sense - the idea that sharks can detect their prey by blood might possibility be a misconception, whereby it is in fact the electrical impulses of an animal that alert these predators to the scene. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the elasmobranchs use this amazing sixth sense to actually detect the north and south poles of the earth, giving a natural compass that would help to explain their incredible navigation skills.

Moving back towards the evolution of the brain, I can offer a slight glimmer into the evolution of our own brain that might well be of interest. It is hypothesised that our male ancestors, much like many higher mammals such as lions, committed infanticide - this is where a female cannot mate as she is lactating, so an invasive male will kill all the children in order to make females reproductively active, so they may sire his offspring. It is speculated that this infanticidal behaviour encouraged females to tolerate each other rather than have isolated lifestyles, forcing males to gather into coalitions to access females. This increased tolerance of the male sex allowed individuals to hunt together, allowing us to increase the proportion of meat that our ancestors ate. This in turn provided the vast excess in energy that was needed to fuel the development of our incredibly large brains, and subsequently sculptured our social evolution. This is why when people say that 'evolution is a result of natural selection', I want them to beat them to death with a stick :p

I hope that has provided some good light reading for some :)
 
Last edited:
If it was to evolve it would be by survival of the fittest, it's one of these mutations that would simply occur and since that species in more intelligent it survives and breds. I have literally no idea how it works and would be suprised if we know how it works, but i'm sure it will be worked out eventually.
 
nuclear92 said:
If it was to evolve it would be by survival of the fittest, it's one of these mutations that would simply occur and since that species in more intelligent it survives and breds. I have literally no idea how it works and would be suprised if we know how it works, but i'm sure it will be worked out eventually.
Click to expand...

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU!!!

:p
 
What about that blue gene super computer simulating a cats brain, only 100 or 1000 slower...

Thats mad...

I mean would it actually be "thinking" like a cat or what? Would it be feeling alive?
 
Telescopi said:
Look up neural networks, they say that's how it works. How something like that evolves though I don't know, I'm not even sure it does.
Click to expand...

Are you skeptical of evolution or are you just disclosing your lack of knowledge? I make no claim to understand the brain I am however quite certain it evolved as did all life on earth.
 
lemonkettaz said:
What about that blue gene super computer simulating a cats brain, only 100 or 1000 slower...

Thats mad...

I mean would it actually be "thinking" like a cat or what? Would it be feeling alive?
Click to expand...

No, they can simulate the physical number of neurons etc however with no sensory input and no other programming and structure its is simply just a massive storage/processing machine. It is no more cat like than a brick.
 
What really did my head in was when my Physics teacher (god knows why he said it) asked us where we see what our eyes see?

That really got us going, it's basically a bunch of light turned into electrical signals that form an image somehow, it's getting me all twisted just thinking about it :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom