the neuronAt the center is a specialized type of cell that makes up a large part of our brain contemporary neuroscience. Neuroscientists explain perception, memory, cognition, and even consciousness itself as the product of billions of these tiny neurons firing tiny voltage spikes inside our brains.
These energy lines convey things like pain and other sensory information to our conscious mind, but in theory they are capable of explaining all of our details. complex consciousness.
At least in principle. Details of this “neural code” are yet to be worked on.
About supporting science journalism
If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
Although neuroscientists have long focused on the spikes that travel through brain cells, “Efhaptic” field effects. it may actually be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, due to the electric fields produced by neurons, rather than their synaptic firing, may play a leading role in the functioning of our minds.
In 1943 American scientists previously described now known as neuron code or spike code. They completed a detailed map of how logical operations can be completed with the “all-or-nothing” nature of neural firing, similar to how computers operate today. Since then neuroscientists from all over the world have participated extensive effort breaking neural codes to understand the peculiarities of cognition and consciousness.
For nothing “The most glaring chasm in our understanding lies in all the things we haven’t learned about in the journey from your eye to your hand,” neuroscientist Mark Humphries acknowledged in 2020. Spike, deep immersion in this journey: “I could not tell all the things of the mind, because we know little what the vertices do to make them”.
Brain researchers have long recognized that there are other ways for neurons to communicate besides firing, including a little-known mechanism known as ephaptic coupling. This coupling arises from the brain’s medium- and large-scale electromagnetic (EM) fields interacting with much smaller-scale synaptic fields (thus resulting from one type). highly localized EM field activity) operates at the nanometric scale.
Retinal neurons, for example, operate without any neural firing. These cells use a type of electrodiffusion, the diffusion of charged particles without synapses, the connection points between neurons. Electrodiffusion passes from a signal to the optic nerve with very fast speed and high bandwidth. Without this we could not see.
“Ephaptic” in ephaptic coupling simply means “to touch.” Although not widely known, ephaptic field effects arise from the textbook electrical and magnetic interactions that power our cells. Interesting experimental results suggest that these forces play a greater role in the brain and perhaps in consciousness than one suspects.
Field effect effects came to my attention in a significant way a Outstanding paper of 2019 From the Case Western Reserve lab Dominique Durand. That lab demonstrated that the mouse cortex was affected by interactions in the ephaptic field without, by definition, synaptic connections. This remarkable effect was discovered by Durand’s team after cutting a part of the mouse hippocampus in half and then measuring the voltage potential that travels up and down the slice. There was almost no change in this measured voltage even after the slice was completely cut, showing a significant effect of the ephaptic areas.
The effect diminished after a certain distance, as we expected. When the slices were separated by 400 microns or more, the ephaptic field effect mostly disappeared.
These results were deemed so remarkable by peer reviewers that the Durand lab had to replicate the results not once, but twice, before the paper was accepted for publication. A scholar At the time of the paper’s publication, he noted that Chiang and colleagues’ findings “should probably (and literally) electrify the field.”
Another group compared speed ephaptic field effects in various tissues, finding that the rate of propagation of ephaptic fields in gray matter is 5,000 times faster than neural firing.
This means that what would take the normal spike pathway one second to travel through the brain, could be traversed 5,000 times in the same amount of time with ephaptic effects. If we cube this over the volume of the brain, we get a whopping 125 billion times more information density from ephaptic areas than from synaptic firing.
The key caveat of this statement is to emphasize that the potential only information density, and not necessarily that this potential can actually be reached. More research will be needed to see how much of this great ephaptic potential our brains realize.
Ample evidence shows that synaptic firing is essential for movement, hearing, touch, and many other actions, but given the higher information density in the ephaptic fields and the extent of the effects of the ephaptic fields, it would be strange if evolution had not been understood. this effect for important brain functions. In fact, it seems to have different ways.
Walter Freeman, a now-deceased legendary neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, noted in a 2006 paper that traditional synaptic firing takes place. can’t explain speed of cognitive function observed over years in rabbits and cats.
Instead, recent findings of ephaptic effects suggest a strong mechanism to explain these speeds. Our recent theoretical paper, based on these findings, suggested that ephaptic field effects may be involved. the first mechanism for consciousness and knowledgerather than neural firing.
Another recent paper includes Costas Anastassiou of the University of California, Los Angeles and former Caltech neuroscientist. Christoph Kochgives him strong support the importance of ephaptic effects. In fact, they find that ephaptic coupling can explain the “rapid coordination” necessary for consciousness “even without very fast synapses.”
This single article may bring the field of ephaptic field science from the fringes of neuroscience to the forefront. Findings about the speed and extent of ephaptic field effects may represent a fundamentally new understanding of how cognition and consciousness work.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific.
