Is your Brain thinking fresh?
January 17th 2010 19:26
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Fresh thinking on the brain
From: Boston.com
For nearly a century we’ve thought about the human brain almost solely in terms of its hundred billion neurons. Electrical signals pulse between millions of those long, slender cells, as though through the microprocessors in a computer, and bingo - we see; we think; we fall in love.
THE OTHER BRAIN: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science
By R. Douglas Fields
Simon & Schuster, 384 pp., $27
THE HIDDEN BRAIN: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives
By Shankar Vedantam
Spiegel & Grau, 288 pp., illustrated, $26
But only about 15 percent of all the cells in our brains are neurons. So how can we be sure that the microprocessor analogy is accurate? What about the other 85 percent?
A new book by R. Douglas Fields, a National Institute of Health neuroscientist, suggests that the other 85 percent - cells called glia that we have long dismissed as mere bubble wrap - may be far more important than we realized.
In “The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science,’’ Fields argues that glia represent a barely explored territory that should not be overlooked.
Labs around the country are finding that glial cells are involved in epilepsy, fetal brain development, mental illness, and even the generation of new neurons in adults. Others form a kind of super-aggressive commando unit that can tunnel through the snarls of dendrites and attack intruding organisms. Still others serve more like maniacal sidewalk sweepers, collecting and absorbing discarded potassium ions that are released by neurons when they fire.
All these roles, Fields believes, suggest the possibility that information travels not only through our neurons, but through a much vaster cellular network. “What would it mean to our current understanding of the mind and medicine,’’ he wonders, “if information flowed not only through neural circuits, but through glia as well?’’
Einstein’s brain, after all, contained as many neurons as yours or mine. But the numbers of Einstein’s glia? Off the charts.
Indeed, the glia that serve as guards, monitors, traffic cops, and overseers may knit together our entire nervous system. They might even learn, or sleep, or vary between men and women. As Fields puts it, “A revolution in our understanding of how the brain is built, how it functions, how it fails in mental illness and disease, and how it is repaired has been ignited with the recent exploration of these long-neglected brain cells.’’
In a less scientific new book, “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives,’’ Shankar Vedantam, a Washington Post reporter, argues that another element of our brains has been neglected for too long: our unconscious minds. Vedantam argues that our “rational mind is unequal to the machinations’’ of this “hidden brain,’’ and that we “are being constantly fooled, tricked, and hoodwinked’’ by it.
“The Hidden Brain’’ presents the unconscious as a brutish, Stone Age set of adaptive instincts that makes rapid and often inaccurate summations about the world. Vedantam’s argument runs something like this: Our hidden brain’s priority is to quickly orient us in any situation and enable to us make rapid, lifesaving decisions. As a result, we often leap to bad judgments.
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I agree that we'll probably never find out exactly how this body works, especially the brain. How does blobs of squishy grey matter turn into thoughts and actions?
Either way the only certain thing is - I don't have enough glia, or whatever Einstein had in his brain, to solve any sort of questions.
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Interesting post. We will always be seeking to understand the brain, but I feel that it connects with something that we cannot physically trace-the spirit-in such a manner that we will never be able to understand the brain, because we will not be able to study the spirit in the same ways or to ever truly understand it.
~Dianna
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Amy and Dianna, I'm sure we're all a little short up top, but even a genius will not be able to solve these riddles I think, I think we'd best leave that to God, but I am trying to get at least a little of the way there.
It's great to see you both.