How does the Brain work

Lesson 1

Actually our scientists are still unable to give proper description about the working process of BRAIN.

The human brain is perhaps the most complex of organs, boasting between 50-100 billion nerve cells or neurons that constantly interact with each other. These neurons ‘carry’ messages through electrochemical processes; meaning, chemicals in our body (charged sodium, potassium and chloride ions) move in and out of these cells and establish an electrical current.

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga Professor of Leicester Bioengineer University publish an article called Nature Reviews Neuroscience. In the article, Prof. Quian Quiroga and co-author Dr. Stefano Panzeri discuss new methodologies that are enabling scientists to better understand how our brain processes information.

“The human brain typically makes decisions based on a single stimulus, by evaluating the activity of a large number of neurons. I don’t get in front of a tiger 100 times to make an average of my neuronal responses and decide if I should run or not. If I see a tiger once, I run” said by Prof. Quian Quiroga

He also add

“A major challenge of our days is (thus) to develop the methodologies to record and process the data from hundreds of neurons and developing these is by no means a trivial task”.

“Our brains are able to create

very complex processes – just imagine the perfect harmony with which we move different muscles for normal walking – thousands of neurons are involved in this and to determine the role of each is complicated”.

In review paper he discusses about two things. One is ‘decoding’ and ‘information theory’.

‘Decoding’ essentially helps determine what must have caused a particular response (much like “working backwards”). Thus, the response of a neuronal population is used to reconstruct the stimulus or behaviour that caused it in the first place. ‘Information theory’, on the other hand, literally quantifies how much information a number of neurons carry about the stimulus.

He said “together, the two approaches not only allow scientists to extract more information on how the brain works, but information that is ambiguous at the level of single neurons, can be clearly evaluated when the whole ‘population’ is considered”

The review is an asset for anyone involved in the field, as it carefully considers and evaluates the two statistical approaches, as well as describes potential applications.