Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
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Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
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Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#2This makes me want to know how quickly this type of growth happens. Is it on the order of seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? Is this why when you learn something, take a break, come back later and everything makes more sense happens?
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#3Growth cones are only relevant during development and in regenerating neurons which are not common. Everyday neurons do however continuously extend (and contract) filopodia which may reach nearby axon terminals and eventually form a synapse, thus causing synaptic rewiring. Synaptic scaling is usually used to refer to a homeostatic and uniforum up- or down- scaling of synaptic weights and is not really relevant to rewiring.
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#4What if something about the electrical signal attracts growth in certain direction, toward other signals firing at the same time?
Or what if some neuron pairs that are not yet connected share quantum entangled structures, that if activated simultaneously ... but still how does direction occur?
What if neurons emit light, that's why you can stimulate them with light...and what if they can somehow detect the faint light from other neurons and get the direction the light comes from, and grow towards that?
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#5I find it strange that the author couldn't find this in a textbook. This is rather common material in a developmental neuroscience textbook or lecture. I've looked through two such books during my (only) course on the topic, and all three sources covered this material.
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#6This makes me want to know how quickly this type of growth happens. Is it on the order of seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? Is this why when you learn something, take a break, come back later and everything makes more sense happens?
This is a bit of an open problem, to the point of being controversial. I'd hesitate to say anyone has a real answer even though we certainly have real experimental data. The philosophical takes range from:
* You never enter the same room twice.
* Your brain partially re-wires every time you sleep.
* Your brain rewires, but the way it rewires is surprisingly predictable and we can track the dynamics.
* Your brain is rewiring literally every second, but not every rewiring is functional - does this imply an implicit robustness?
Etc, etc.
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#7Funnily enough over this last weekend, I read a great review on this subject from earlier this year:
“Synaptic Specificity, Recognition Molecules, and Assembly of Neural Circuits” by Sanes and Zipursky
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.008
For me, the hard part has always been understanding how this whole thing is orchestrated on a cellular and molecular level.
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#8This makes me want to know how quickly this type of growth happens. Is it on the order of seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? Is this why when you learn something, take a break, come back later and everything makes more sense happens?
I've noticed that there's a weird area when learning a physical skill that there's a strange growth curve. You suck at first, then quickly get to some kind of milestone, then get worse before you get better. It feels like my brain is attempting to delegate some of the motor activity to lower levels before they are 'ready', but in fact it might be an essential part of training those neurons.
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#9The question of how neurons find each other to connect was recently studied with experimental connectomics--altering neurons and then mapping their synaptic circuits with electron microscopy--in this paper by Javier Valdes Aleman et al. 2019 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/697763v1 , using Drosophila's somatosensory axons and central interneurons as a model.
If the OP's website Disqus worked (can't ever get the "post" button for comments after login), the above could have gone straight into the page.
Re: Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
#10Growth cones are only relevant during development and in regenerating neurons which are not common. Everyday neurons do however continuously extend (and contract) filopodia which may reach nearby axon terminals and eventually form a synapse, thus causing synaptic rewiring. Synaptic scaling is usually used to refer to a homeostatic and uniforum up- or down- scaling of synaptic weights and is not really relevant to rew…
What about hippocampal neurogenesis? Those are spewing out at a nearly constant rate all the time