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Amazing to have some evidence of the processing capabilities dendrites could possess. Though this only makes our understanding of the brain that much slimmer.
by tannerc 13y ago
Amazing to have some evidence of the processing capabilities dendrites could possess. Though this only makes our understanding of the brain that much slimmer.
With billions of neurons and dendrites interacting all the time, if each are compartmentalized we're going to have a difficult time coming up with a model to replicate the effects. Which, as I understand it, is our goal in an effort to better understand how the brain works overall.
Still, with this insight it's clear we've got some immensely powerful hardware bouncing around between our ears. What a truly brilliant machine.
- PeterisP 13y agoI wouldn't be discouraged - this is actually a way of computation that we could "read" by looking at the brain. The dentritic 'computations' would depend on the geometry of the dendrite and the location of synaptic connections; so the current projects that want to slice a brain in thin slices, scan them, and reconstruct the neurons, would be able to build an exact map for that type of computation, simply by automatically converting each dendrite's connection geometry to a formula/model of that dendritic tree.