FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Your Brain Just Got a Whole Lot More Powerful

The brain's information pathways are also information computers.
Image: Shanon Lawson

There are a great number of people that want us to believe that the brain has been all but cracked. Ray Kurzweil might be chief among them, but I’d even say it’s a pervasive problem in pop science coverage. We hear way more about mind-controlled this and that—which is always much more rudimentary than headlines would have you think—and how we’re just one big government science project away from mapping the entire thing, and less about neuroscience’s vertigo-inducing knowledge gulfs. In reality, knowledge of the brain today is about where knowledge of the body was in the 1800s.

To wit: researchers at the University of North Carlina just discovered an entire processing system within the brain among cells previously assumed to be passive wiring, according to a report published today in Nature. This system is based on dendrites, cells that had been thought to simply carry information around the brain. So then you’re much smarter—the brain is more powerful—but you’re still only as smart as you are. A bit frustrating, isn’t it?

Advertisement

Spencer Smith, an assistant professor at UNC’s School of Medicine, had this to say via press release: "Imagine you're reverse engineering a piece of alien technology, and what you thought was simple wiring turns out to be transistors that compute information. That's what this finding is like. The implications are exciting to think about." Smith et al’s research suggests that, at the very least, the dendrites may be involved in how brains process visual information.

This is a dendrite, the branch-like structure of a single neuron in the brain. The bright object from the top is a pipette attached to a dendrite in the brain of a mouse. The pipette allows researchers to measure electrical activity, such as a dendritic spike, the bright spot in the middle of the image/Spencer Smith

Smith built his own two-photon microscope for the research, which involved attaching a microscopic glass pipette to a dendrite in the brains of both anesthetized and awake mice. “You can't see the dendrite,” Smith said. “So you have to do this blind. It's like fishing if all you can see is the electrical trace of a fish." Once the setup is complete, the task was to watch for electrical spikes originating within the dendrites—spikes which had been thought to only originate within the brain’s axons.

These electrical spikes are indications of processing activity. The researchers put the mice in front of computer screens, which delivered different visual stimuli. The result was electrical activity that differed as the stimuli differed, hence the assumption that dendrites are locally processing visual information. This is certainly only a taste of this new neural realm, but it suffices to say that the map of your grey junk just got a lot more complicated.

@everydayelk