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Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#11

Post by jph »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #8
Robotbeat wrote: post #4

I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…

I had a crazy idea about neurons that I'll share here, because why not? What if each time a neuron sends a signal to another neuron the potential required for that connection decreases slightly? So the next time there's an action potential between neurons it's more likely to go where it has already gone. In other words, frequent connections make that same pathway more readily traversed. Could it be that a memory is s…

The catchphrase is "neurons that fire together wire together".

Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#13

Post by mstipetic »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #8
Robotbeat wrote: post #4

I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…

I had a crazy idea about neurons that I'll share here, because why not? What if each time a neuron sends a signal to another neuron the potential required for that connection decreases slightly? So the next time there's an action potential between neurons it's more likely to go where it has already gone. In other words, frequent connections make that same pathway more readily traversed. Could it be that a memory is s…

I have a completely layman theory that that’s what dreams are. Worn out pathways that our ego or consciousness is not letting through to us, but are being used in our subconscious, being able to manifest themselves finally. That’s why we can see things that are bothering us or on our mind in the background there

Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#14

Post by alexmorley »

> For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength of radiation.

This hasn't been true for at least 20 years. There's a classic paper showing evidence of this in 1993 (O'Keefe and Reece) in rats. And has been an active area of discussion both before and since. (Note that it's not to say that rate isn't important, but as a community no one has beleived that all the information would be encoded in rate for many years)

There's lots of good explainers here that link to relevant research: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia:Computation...

Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#15

Post by morpheos137 »

vmception wrote: post #9
Robotbeat wrote: post #4

I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…

From my understanding, the current approach is basically the idea that if you put a bunch of neurons in a room, it eventually starts questioning the universe It really lacks nuance

What if the universe and the room is neurons all the way down?

Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#16

Post by mikewarot »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #6
Robotbeat wrote: post #4

I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…

There’s a strong bias toward things that are model-able in neuroscience. The role of microtubules, for example, are mostly ignored even though they may explain the complexity of cognition displayed by relatively “simple” brains.

Fringe Tangent:

It's possible those microtubules in our brains are 1 dimensional superconductors, and thus might be capable of holding Qubits. We might have quantum memory.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1812/1812.05602.pdf

Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#18

Post by xkeysc0re »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #8
Robotbeat wrote: post #4

I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…

I had a crazy idea about neurons that I'll share here, because why not? What if each time a neuron sends a signal to another neuron the potential required for that connection decreases slightly? So the next time there's an action potential between neurons it's more likely to go where it has already gone. In other words, frequent connections make that same pathway more readily traversed. Could it be that a memory is s…

Definitely check out the work of Donald Hebb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory

Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#19

Post by neom »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #8
Robotbeat wrote: post #4

I find a lot of the common explanations of how the brain works in neuroscience to be unsatisfying… compared to molecular biology, it just feels like often we don’t have a solid (falsifiable, etc) grasp of what’s actually happening, yet… too much handwaving (for instance, the lack of any specifics on where precisely some data is located… even “it’s stored in the connections” seems not quite true or falsifiable… althou…

I had a crazy idea about neurons that I'll share here, because why not? What if each time a neuron sends a signal to another neuron the potential required for that connection decreases slightly? So the next time there's an action potential between neurons it's more likely to go where it has already gone. In other words, frequent connections make that same pathway more readily traversed. Could it be that a memory is s…

This is a good but old article+paper that has some info on how neural networks are organized and how neurons work in the context of the physiology of the brain (information flow), the columns and layers play important but not well known functions in this: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2017.0008...

Funnily, I think AI is a potentially really good use for understanding neurology further. There is so much disparate research out there, from the neuron, to the network, to the brain itself, it would be interested to feed it all into GPT-3, both the research papers and a large compendium of imaging and firing maps, and then ask it to look for connections. I'd be ridiculously interested in working on that (time to get a phd?).

Re: Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing

#20

Post by _f9cu »

Don't get yourself distracted into the light while trying to find how neuron learns. Once get distracted, always be distracted and get into a rabbit hole of plethora of information but loose the initial motive.

Shape of the neurons is the memory. A fetus brain doesn't have ups and downs. It is fluidic. As we learn, we get ridges. This is just a fact to prove that neurons/ the neural fluid(neurons together) take shape as it learns. Once we establish a simple, yet truthy foundation, pile up things on this for more missing pieces.

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