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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
by BitwiseFool 5y ago
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 simply a new signal traveling down a 'worn path'?
I realize that there needs to be some way for this resistance change to be reset over time, so is it possible that dreams serve the purpose of writing somewhat random data, like wear leveling or trimming on an SSD?
This is just pure speculation and I have "Hello World" levels of knowledge about neuroscience. But hey, it's fun to speculate, right?
- kwertyops 5y agoIt sounds like you are essentially describing long-term potentiation (LTP). See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
- jph 5y agoThe catchphrase is "neurons that fire together wire together".
- mstipetic 5y agoI 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
- meowkit 5y agohttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.24.219089v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.24.219089v1 It’s recently suggested there is nothing special about dreaming - its just a confluence of himan interpretation with a mechanism to stop you from going blind.
- mstipetic 5y agoWhen I went to a therapist and we went to analyze my dreams it got weird how many details and meanings one could find there
- xkeysc0re 5y agoDefinitely check out the work of Donald Hebb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
- neom 5y agoThis 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.2017.00081/full 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?).
- l33t2328 5y agoIs this not the idea of a synapse? A pathway that is easier to take because it has been taken before? I only have an AI understanding here, so this could be too simple.