What if every neuron in our brain was directly connected to every other neuron? Considering that our brains constitute of about 86 billion neurons, our brains would end up being gigantic! Computational scientists have estimated that if each of our brains were fully connected in the shape of a sphere, they would have to be 20 km in diameter. You can imagine the metabolic costs that would be required to manage such a big head (at the moment, our brains use 20% of our bodies’ energy supplies). Another disadvantage would be a slow in processing speed and synchronizing activity because of longer axons. This also would result in longer dendrites in order to increase the number of synapses.
It was because of all these reasons that our brains evolved to not allow all neurons to connect to one another. Hence, over the past several thousand years, as our brain size increased, the proportional connectivity of our brains decreased.
“If the Human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn’t understand it…”
An extract from the wonderful book Sophie’s world by Jostein Gaarder. For me, the above sentence sums up one of the main reasons to why I find neuroscience- the study of the human brain- an exceptionally fascinating field of study. It is, simply put, a process of using human brains to study human brains. In other words, using a web of eighty six billion neurons to study itself. The complexity of the human brain may cause it to be nuisance to study but its the reason we’re intelligent enough to study it in the first place.
But due to the same reason, can we ever truly and thoroughly fathom this astonishing organ? It was the philosopher Immanel Kant who was one of the first people to suggest that we can never truly know ourselves or in other words, our brains. He believed that to truly understand something, you have to look at it at an outer perspective, which we can’t really do as we’re using brains to study brains. For instance, we could fathom the intelligence system of a bee or a dog but not ourselves.
But is this really the case? We seem to be doing fine so far…
Recent studies by researchers at the universities of Essex, Wolverhampton and Malaya have uncovered evidence that may allow us to one day develop a computer that could read our thoughts.
‘Cognitive biometrics’ was until recently a branch of science and technology considered to be a mere fantasy by many skeptics. Simply put, in cognitive biometrics, the response of your nervous system to a stimulus is measured and then used to identify who you are. In one form of this technology, a series of letter or images are flashed onto a screen and your P300 wave (a type of electrical activity in the brain) is measured via electrodes fixed to your head.
Researchers have found that if all the characters or images on the screen appear on the same place, the system identifies each individual fairly accurately. This is because every individual is thought to have a unique P300 wave to a certain visual stimulus. Accuracy however need to be improved further before cognitive biometrics are put to mainstream use.
Many researchers speculate that this mind-reading software could replace passwords in new security systems. Even so, What I think makes this discovery so significant is that it could form the very basis of the technology required by humans in order to merge with computers.
Our brains constitute of about 86 billion nerve cells. For comparison, note that there are about three hundred billion stars in our galaxy. If these nerve cells were laid end to end, they would stretch around our planet four and a half times.
But its not the mind-blowing number of cells that make the human brain such an extraordinary organ - its their interactions with one another. It’s the complex manner in which they connect with each other that makes us so intelligent. In fact, your brain forms about a million new connections with each second that passes by, and the patterns of these connections are constantly changing.
… Is a fascinating and utterly bizarre disorder where patients deny their disability. For instance, one out of twenty patients who suffer a complete paralysis of the left side of their body, as a result of a stroke in the right hemisphere, deny it. This is despite the fact that they are healthy and intelligent in every other sense.
What’s even more astonishing is that some of these patients not only deny their own paralysis but also the paralysis of other patients! Such cases are thought to be connected with mirror neurons - special neurons in our brain that not only fire when we ourselves perform an action but also when we watch someone else perform it.
The fields of neuroscience and neurobiology are relatively novel fields within science. Of course, mankind has been questioning its own existence and nature for thousands of years, but it is only recently that we’ve seriously begun to study our selves… to study our own brains. Yet, we’ve uncovered so much in such a short period of time.
However, one of the many great enigmas that remain for us to uncover is that of consciousness: how it can arise from immaterial matter. What is it that causes something to be conscious? How can we measure different ‘levels’ of consciousness? There’s no denying that we are at least partly consciousness, but we do not know how and why. Even if we haven’t truly answered these questions, neuroscientists have made remarkable progress with various states of consciousness. Even more, recent studies convey that consciousness is a result of complex dynamic interactions of different areas of the brain as a whole and not restricted to a mere section of the organ. This has caused neurobiologists to speculate that the billions of neurons and their interactions together is what results into the ‘mind’. They have further speculated, that each person’s ‘mind’ is unique as the ways these neurons are arranged are unique (although we all share the same basic foundations in structure). Every single one of us has one hundred billion neurons in our brains, where each is connected with hundreds of thousands of others in a specific pattern determined by our genes. These specific patterns could be what determine our personality. In other terms, thoughts and consciousness do not depend on the structures in our brains but the relationship between the parts.
If this is true then in several decades, we could perhaps be able to build a copy of our own brains by mimicking these structures (advancements in nano-medicine give me hope). All one has to do is build the exact same pattern of neurons and the copy would think it was you. Yes, it may sound like science fiction and incredibly laborious to achieve. But I think it’s worth the try…
Above is a jaw-dropping comparison between a series of neurons and the universe. One can’t retain oneself from musing over the similarities between the infinite cosmos and the jelly substance inside our cranium. We are constantly glorified the breathtaking macrocosm, when we in actuality posses a similar zone amongst ourselves. How is it that both these contrasting regions can have such indistinguishable structures? Personally, I like to consider it not a coincidence but rather a intended motif.
