12 ms·
Intercellular communication in the brain through a dendritic nanotubular network
- searine 1y agoThis research was primarily done at John's Hopkins in Baltimore and funded by NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
- bbor 1y agoGood reminder... Presumably, the lab phases were completed before 2025. In February of this year, a neuroscientist at John Hopkins said of the political spending cuts “This is simply the end.” https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/trumps-nih-budget-cuts-threaten-research-stirring-panic-rcna191744 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/trumps-nih-budg... :(
- bakies 1y agoI dont think there is nearly enough attention on how much of our great science in the US has come to a complete halt.
- GeorgeTirebiter 1y agoChina will pick up the slack.......
- kridsdale3 1y agoThere has been a lot of attention. But not enough, yes. Sadly, thanks to Democracy, we have a plurality of voters who do not value research, or understand how it will one day be themselves who are patients.
- neom 1y agopreprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.20.655147v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.20.655147v1....
- lorenzohess 1y agoEditor's summary: > Synaptic connections mediate classical intercellular communication in the brain. However, recent data have demonstrated the existence of noncanonical routes of interneuronal communication mediating the transport of materials including calcium, mitochondria, and pathogenic proteins such as amyloid beta (Aβ). Using super-resolution and electron microscopy, Chang et al. identified and characterized structures called nanotubular bridges that connect dendrites in the brain (see the Perspective by Budinger and Heneka). These bridges mediate the transport of calcium ions, small molecules, and Aβ peptides, and may contribute to the spreading and accumulation of pathological Aβ in Alzheimer’s disease. —Mattia Maroso
- siavosh 1y agodoes super-resolution refer to the image processing technique of interpolating/hallucinating higher resolutions? if so, is this a common/respected part of evidence gathering?
- cma 1y agoUsually methods that get past the diffraction limit but not through hallucination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_microscopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_microscopy But they say they used ML analysis too in the abstract > Using super-resolution microscopy,25 we characterized their unique molecular composition and dynamics in dissociated neurons,26 enabling Ca 2+ propagation over distances. Utilizing imaging and machine-learning-based27 analysis, we confirmed the in situ presence of DNTs connecting dendrites to other dendrites28 whose anatomical features are distinguished from synaptic dendritic spines
- cwillu 1y agoSuper resolution refers to imaging below the refraction limit, more or less by having the receiving sensor within a wavelength or two of the material being imaged, allowing you to use the nearfield (which doesn't have a diffraction limit, but which also doesn't propagate beyond a couple wavelengths) instead of the farfield (which does, and does). It's unrelated to the nvidia marketing term for ai filtering of images.
- didibus 1y agoTomorrow's headline: New AI model uses nanotubular-like communication just like the human brain and achieves 100% SWE-Bench score.
- k__ 1y agoYou mean: Altman Gave GPT Alzheimer's Disease to Spread Awareness
- xeonmc 1y agoFrom my experience GPT already exhibits symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
- Noaidi 1y ago[flagged]
- quantummagic 1y agoA "micro" tubule is smaller than a "nano" tubule? How did they get that backwards?
- j45 1y agoThis reminded me about this study from 2014 referencing quantum vibrations in the brain: "Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' inside brain neurons supports controversial theory of consciousness" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.h...
- vonneumannstan 1y agoKnew we would have a quantum woo comment in the first 10 comments on this. Unless you can show a coherent quantum state at human body temp then please stop with this nonsense.
- neom 1y agoJust in case anyone is interested: There is good research into microtubules being related to neurodiversity, the research is specifically in the direction of ASD. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33526823/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33526823/ - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3728923/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3728923/ On the second point of QM in biology more generally tho, this research is interesting: https://arxiv.org/html/2409.03497v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2409.03497v1
- vonneumannstan 1y agoShould be noted that none of these papers addresses computation via qubits in the neuronal tubes which is central to the OrchOR theory of quantum woo consciousness.
- Noaidi 1y agoI am one of these people. I have polymorphisms in the DNM1 and DNM3 gene which I believe causes my OCD and Asperger’s. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37132416/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37132416/
- pugworthy 1y agoIrrespective, it's interesting to see a different reference to small tubular structures from some time ago.
- voxleone 1y agoPenrose’s vindication: In a broad philosophical sense. His intuition that quantum effects might play some role in cognition seems less far-fetched now than it did 30 years ago. But vindication of Orch OR specifically (microtubule-based quantum gravity collapses driving consciousness) not yet. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.0254 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.025...
- fair_enough 1y agoThe OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation: Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells. Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
- Noaidi 1y agoWow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in. Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ljlolel 1y agoAlso microtubules with quantum…
- ben_w 1y agoThe word "consciousness" means at least 40 distinct things; some of those (e.g. brain being alive and functioning) are obviously connected to microtubles; others (e.g. qualia, which is what most understand Penrose invoked microtubles to explain) are so ill-defined as to be untestable and unfalsifiable. That Penrose also seems to have a fundamental error in his understanding of the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, doesn't help.
- atarian 1y agoit’s amazing to me how we’re still discovering new pieces of the human body every year. you would have thought by now we’d have discovered everything
- bbor 1y agoTo paraphrase the great Noam Chomsky: cognitive science is in a pre-Gallilean stage. Many thousands of incredible scientists have done amazing work over the past ~century, but cutting-edge neuroscience still doesn't have the conceptual tools to go much farther than "when you look at apples this part of your cortex is more active, so we'll call this the Apple Zone". Sadly/happily, I personally think there's good reason to think that this will change in our lifetime, which mean's we can all find out if trading the medicalization of mental health treatment (i.e. progressing beyond symptom-based guess-and-check) for governmental access to actual lie detecting helmets (i.e. dystopia) is worth it...
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y agoThere's a new theory that we might actually gain a greater understanding of the human mind by studying the AI systems we create, because we can basically get a perfect X-ray of their neural nets at any particular state. When we look at the "apple zone" part of an AI model that lights up, we see it in way higher resolution than our best scans of the human brain, and this might tell us something about how apples are perceived by both systems, or how language is represented neurally, or any number of other things.
- tsimionescu 1y agoI think this is more or less exactly what Chomsky hoped (hopes?) AI research would eventually become, rather than the purely pragmatic pursuit of tool making it has typically been.
- ACCount37 1y agoAnd we can barely figure out how the modern LLMs work. That doesn't bode well for minds being human-interpretable, not at all. I used to think that the biggest bottleneck to understanding the workings of the human brain was that it defies instrumentation. Which could be solved by better imaging techniques, high throughput direct neural interfaces, etc. But looking at the state of AI now? If we had full read/write access to the state of every single neuron in the brain, what would we be able to learn? Maybe not that much.
- api 1y agoI still think there's a good chance that evolution has figured out some way to leverage quantum computation, probably in a very different way from the way we're trying to do it with ultra-cold low noise quantum digital circuits. If this is the case it's going to be some kind of high temperature noisy analog stochastic way of harnessing QC. The phrase "stochastic analog quantum computer" comes to mind. It's how little energy the brain uses, especially for learning. The brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI on a classical computer, not to mention still beating it in terms of performance and versatility. Transistors do not use millions of times more energy than synapses, and processor feature sizes are not millions of times larger. Something else is going on. Either the brain is leveraging QC or our AI training algorithms are just really really horrible compared to whatever is happening in biology. Maybe biology found learning methods that work thousands of times better than differential backpropagation.
- adastra22 1y agoThat seems incredibly unlikely given the impossibility of maintaining coherent quantum state in a noisy thermal environment like the brain.
- Noaidi 1y agoPenrose and other talk about this and how it’s possible in the noisy wet messy environment of the human brain. https://www.pbs.org/video/was-penrose-right-new-evidence-for-quantum-effects-in-the-brain-pe0bka/ https://www.pbs.org/video/was-penrose-right-new-evidence-for... Just cause we don’t understand it yet does not mean it’s not possible.
- adastra22 1y agoFYI Penrose is a cautionary tale in the physicist community. He is/was once a competent academic, but his quantum consciousness ideas are viewed similarly to tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. It is technobabble word salad; quantum woo driven more by a personal objection to the implications of Newtonian determinism to the philosophy of the mind, not reason. We understand quantum interactions more than sufficiently enough to know that the thread of hope he clings to, the soul of the gaps via quantum woo, is not in any way plausible. It is comparable to a perpetual motion machine.
- stepquiet 1y agoTotally tubular, man!
- m3kw9 1y agoAnd then you have AI “specialist “ like Hinton doing thought experiments saying if we replaced a neuron with ones we made we would still be conscious exactly the same way
- loginx 1y agoSo, there IS a series of tubes?
- ape4 1y agoTime to re-designed our artificial neural networks
- thenobsta 1y agoOne of the neat and mindnumbing things about the brain is the number of information passing pathways. There are so many and as this discovery evidences, we're still finding new ones. Not sure our ANNs will ever be able to model them all.
- tsimionescu 1y agoOur ANNs have abandoned any similarity with brain neural networks basically right after they appeared. As we've learned more about neuro-biology, the gap has simply grown larger.
- GeorgeTirebiter 1y agoI've been impressed with CfCs --- and the stuff Liquid https://www.liquid.ai/research/liquid-neural-networks-research https://www.liquid.ai/research/liquid-neural-networks-resear... is trying to do: model neurons as differential equations, and use CfC methods to alleviate runtime ODE solving, using approximations (or tight integral bounds), so there’s often a tradeoff between approximation error and speed. https://chatgpt.com/share/68f2ada8-06ac-8002-9191-269b0cbba417 https://chatgpt.com/share/68f2ada8-06ac-8002-9191-269b0cbba4... The Big question is: WHERE is the Complexity? If Complexity is Fixed in a System, it must be Somewhere. (you can see this at play any time you look at a large software system.) Do you have simple 'blocks' and many of them? OR, do you have more complicated blocks (requiring more computons), but fewer of them? I think this is an exciting research area right now.
- tsimionescu 1y agoBiological neurons are not easily modeled as any neat mathematical system. They seem to perform significant computational tasks even when alone - as do many other cells in the body, btw. Neuron linking is also more complex than the simplistic weighted connection model. Also, in biological neural networks, you have multiple kinds of neurotransmitters, not just a single signal, and beyond the quantity of neurotransmitters and their electrical properties being transmitted, the frequency of neuron firing is also known to be a significant factor that affects computation; and beyond neurotransmitters, hormones secreted in the brain and other places have some clear effects on cognition. And these are just pieces we know - there are certainly all sorts of other effects that we don't know, some chemical, some structural, some even physical perhaps (consider how all of the moving charges in one part of the brain might interact with other parts through electromagnetic fields). We have no idea how much of this complexity is fundamental and how much is incidental, of course. But it is certain that every part of the brain is way more complex than the ultra-simplistic ANNs, and replacing the sigmoid function with some ODE will not move that needle significantly.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SlightlyLeftPad 1y agoBananuler, interactivodular…
- fpsvogel 1y agoring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring …
- kridsdale3 1y agoI've got my hunches
- cyanydeez 1y agoThe same thing is hypothesized for most tissue in the body and a source of how cancer seems to spread without direct connectivity. It's been classified so often as just background curioso that it never was investigated further. Hopefully finer grained imaging will elludicdate this stuff.