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ambience: Neuron Chatter
“So a neuronal avalanche is a cascade of activity among brain cells that seems to follow the behavior of real avalanches.”
That’s the sound of brain cells communicating, each cell touching off activity in other cells, just like a moving rock might cause many rocks to move in an avalanche. Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries – a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. We’re with John Beggs, a biophysicist at Indiana University who is trying to figure out how the billions of neurons inside our heads organize themselves into thoughts.
“Most of the time when one brain cell is active, it activates only one other brain cell. But occasionally one brain cell being active can activate thousands or hundreds of thousands of brains cells.”
When a brain cell activates one other cell, sending a signal via a single chain of neurons, it’s can be a bit like the game of telephone, and you wouldn’t think it could necessarily lead to an effective transmission. But what happens is that it can lead to a steady state avalanche of neural activity, and then the chances are the right message will get through, producing a thought, for example.
“It turns out that if you have this type of avalanche propagation it actually turns out to be very efficient for transmitting information, very efficient for storing information, and other people have shown that it could be very efficient for computing things. And yet, it’s not unstable. So all these things that you might expect a brain to do – store information, transmit information, compute and operate in a stable way without getting into seizures — all these things it seems to be able to do quite well at the critical point, and at the critical point, it produces avalanches of activity. “
You can check out John Beggs’ blog on pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.
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