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The Thalamus - The Kernel in Your Mind
corbettw writes "This article on Yahoo Science News describes a new finding that explains how the thalamus is used by your brain to essentially boot your brain, and provide for central processing and control of all impulses going to and from the cortex. The article describes its function as an operating system, but from the description it actually seems closer to the functions of a kernel." From the article: "The finding, published last week in the journal Neuroscience, changes the way scientists understand nitric oxide's role in the brain, and it also has them rethinking the function of the thalamus, where it is released. The thalamus was thought to be a fairly primitive structure, sort of a gate that could either open and allow sensory information to stream into the cortex, the higher functioning part of the brain, or cut off the flow entirely. Godwin says the new research shows it's more accurate to think of the thalamus not as a gate but as a club bouncer, who doesn't simply allow a huge rush of people to go in or no one at all, but picks and chooses whom to let in and out. "
I find the idea of a brain boot annoying. I just hope there's no Vista in there, but still hope to get a life.
it's more accurate to think of the thalamus not as a gate but as a club bouncer, who doesn't simply allow a huge rush of people to go in or no one at all, but picks and chooses whom to let in and out. "
Thalamus: Whoa buddy, you can't go in.
Neuron: But, I'm with her!
Thalamus: Her? Yeah right!
Neuron: Cortica! Cortica! Come back! We can be together!
[meanwhile in the real world]
John: Hey Bobby, catch... whoa, heads up!
Bobby: Owwww!
KERNAL PANIC!!!
"the thalamus is used by your brain to essentially boot your brain"
Which now raises hope for those of us who want dual-boot flexibility.
Where were you when the voynix came?
FTP:"Your Brain Works Like the Internet"
A collection of pipes moving pr0n around?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
...is a brain that will boot in the first place.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
So...how long will it be until we can install Linux on one of these babies? Seriously though, this seems like a pretty exciting discovery, anything that helps Medical Science get a better handle on the consequences of changes in brain chemistry can only help with treatment of the scarier diseases like schizophrenia.
But then they drifted off topic and started arguing about Nazis and Hitler and the discussion had to be ended.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
From: Andy T.
:-)
To: The Almighty
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in -3000 BC is a fundamental error.
Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
BThalamusD is dying. I'd give it 80-90 years. 100 years tops.
So... can it run Linux?
The answer is obviously yes, but only the even version numbers.
apterous.org
but i'm paging out to my liver!
That which does not kill her only prolongs my agony.
Anyway, this is an interesting article. This research has a lot of promise in coming years and decades as better understanding brain chemistry advances pharmaceuticals and medical treatments. From TFA: "This study shows a unique role for nitric oxide. It may help us to someday understand what goes wrong in diseases that affect cognitive processing, such as attention deficit disorder or schizophrenia, and it adds to our fundamental understanding of how we perceive the world around us."
People have been comparing brains to computers almost as long as they have been comparing computers to brains. The Computational Theory of Mind looks at the mind (the brain's software as some have described it) in pretty a logical way, not too far away from computational reasoning. These comparisons are useful for understanding larger concepts but they generally fall apart when you get to the nuts and bolts of it. For example, the brain processes many shades of grey instead of a computer's binary perception. Neural networks and, to a lessor extent, quantum computing seek to emulate some of the processes of the brain.
On an aside, if you are interested in learning more about machine intelegence, I highly recomend reading Ray Kurzweil's books.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I wonder when the Hague will rule that freedom from mind-altering drugs and effects is a human right. It can't come soon enough.
wait for it... Does it run Linux?
Homer: Okay, brain. You don't like me, and I don't like you, but let's get through this thing and then I can continue killing you with beer.
Homer's Brain: It's a deal!
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
This article on Yahoo Science News describes a new finding that explains how the thalamus is used by your brain to essentially boot your brain
So that's what Orwell meant when he wrote: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever."
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Are you sure that it doesn't sound more like a bootloader, or a DHCP server, or a firewall/router, at the edge of the network, protecting the main Beowulf cluster, etc., etc....
Ok, enough of that.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
One interesting thing about this is that nitric oxide is produced in the sinuses. Does "proper" nasal breathing result in altering the concentration of this molecule in the blood and therefore have an effect on consciousness?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I personally think that the thalamus is like a coathook. You can hang whatever metaphor you feel like on it.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Can somebody tell me where to find the Ctrl, Alt, and Delete buttons for my brain???
That the odds that someone compares this to something about the Nazis approaches unity.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
From the summary:
The article describes its function as an operating system, but from the description it actually seems closer to the functions of a kernel.
Does this mean we should call the brain the Brain/Thalamus? It's unfair to give the entire package precedence over the kernel, as one is useless without the other.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
At least according to Senator Stevens it is.
Dumbest article ever.
I think its the other way round :-P
cheers
This also brings us closer to the day when we can re-program our brains to a desired previous state. This is something you might want to do after (for example) learning Esperanto or how to speak very fluent Klingon, when you start to think that Jon Katz news items make perfect sense, having gone to see "Gigli" or "Star Trek 10", having seen the Goatse image one too many times (once is too much!) or getting infected with an embarassing Olivia Newton-John earworm: things you'd really not have in your wetware. Perhaps Symantec should roll out a new version of Norton Ghost. One that uses real ghosts, this time.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I really wish submitters would include a link to the research paper, so we could actually judge the research for ourselves instead of relying on some journalist's interpretation. Here's the abstract for this paper, from Neuroscience:
Diurnal gene expression patterns of T-type calcium channels and their modulation by ethanol
The transient (T-type) calcium channel participates in the generation of normal brain rhythms as well as abnormal rhythms associated with a range of neurological disorders. There are three different isoforms of T-type channels and all are particularly enriched in the thalamus, which is involved in generating many of these rhythms. We report a novel means of T-type channel regulation in the thalamus that involves diurnal regulation of gene expression. Using real time polymerase chain reaction we detected a diurnal pattern of gene expression for all T-type channel transcripts. The peak of gene expression for the CaV3.1 transcript occurred close to the transition from active to inactive (sleep) states, while expression for both CaV3.2 and CaV3.3 peaked near the transition of inactive to active phase. We assessed the effect of chronic consumption of ethanol on these gene expression patterns by examining thalamic tissues of ethanol-consuming cohorts that were housed with the controls, but which received ethanol in the form of a liquid diet. Ethanol consumption resulted in a significant shift of peak gene expression of approximately 5 h for CaV3.2 toward the normally active phase of the mice, as well as increasing the overall gene expression levels by approximately 1.7-fold. Peak gene expression was significantly increased for both CaV3.2 and CaV3.3. Measurements of CaV3.3 protein expression reflected increases in gene expression due to ethanol. Our results illustrate a novel regulatory mechanism for T-type calcium channels that is consistent with their important role in generating thalamocortical sleep rhythms, and suggests that alterations in the pattern of gene expression of these channels could contribute to the disruption of normal sleep by ethanol.
Curiously, I get the impression that the emphasis of the research is somewhat different from what was emphasized in the popular-press article.
brain ... it actually seems closer to the functions of a kernel
so... God and Linus invented the same thing?
#@$&!!@# I always thought Linus is God =)
"We might have to wait for Book Camp for that one..
Dilbert: "Why has Wally been barking, chewing the managers, and peeing on the flowcharts all day?"
Dogbert: "He rebooted his brain with Cujo using that new 'Book Camp' software."
Where were you when the voynix came?
Nevermind . . . no pun intended either
hi hi hi hah ha HA hAH HAH hihi hihi wooooo he he hah ha ha
Godwin also says that the thalamus is like Nazi Germany; it declares some people are full citizens and others are untermensch.
It's not the brain that works like an OS, apparently it's the OS that has a similar structure to a brain (already).
I guess we're on the right way to seeing higher intelligence emerge from machines in the next few decades.
Godwin says the new research shows it's more accurate to think of the thalamus not as a gate but as a club bouncer, who doesn't simply allow a huge rush of people to go in or no one at all, but picks and chooses whom to let in and out. "
Why a bouncer. I thought we used car analogies around here...
it's more accurate to think of the thalamus not as a bouncer, but a traffic cop, who doesn't simply allow a huge rush of cars to go in or no one at all, but picks and chooses whom to let in and out.
There, now I understand it.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
After all, it's got all that massive parallelism and capability of continuing working after parts are damaged and even routing around damage.
What happens when someone boots their brain and can't remember the password at the login screen?
"How about watching one (good) movie, playing one (good) game, reading one (good) book all over again? After forgetting the plot and characters you'll get the same experience as reading/watching/playing for the first time."
Specifically, imagine the biggest get-a-life fan of the Bill Murray film "Groundhog Day" who re-sets his brain after watching it every day so he can watch it anew the next day.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I don't know if I can trust any kernel to be compared to the brain, after all Windows gets the Blue Scream of Death and the Linux gets Panic Attacks, DOS has to be rebooted often to modify memory management, Unix gets segmentation falls and bus errors. This is terrible news, I think I am just going to walk around in circles until I stop thinking about this... Damn! It's a deadlock forced by a race condition! I just want to go to sleep.
You can't handle the truth.
"it's more accurate to think of the thalamus not as a bouncer, but a traffic cop, who doesn't simply allow a huge rush of cars to go in or no one at all, but picks and chooses whom to let in and out."
Since it is Godwin who came up with this, the traffic cop is dressed in a smart black SS uniform. And you don't want to be the one he sends away.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Dammit, you people must have known I set that as my wakeup track! (No, seriously, I did...)
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
"Approach, students. Close the circle at the feet of the master. You have come to me asking that I be your guide along the path of Ti Kwan Leep. But, be warned: To learn its ways, you must learn the ways of your own soul. Let us meditate upon this wisdom now. So:
Aaaaaaooooommm......"
That is why the creature only ate the thalamus of the humans it killed .
A mind is a terrible thing to waste... Especially if you're really hungry
This already exists, but in people it is known as dual personalities :)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
PENN FROM PENN & TELLER: They're coming in from remote nodes. They're going after the Kernal!
TONY SOPRANO'S SHRINK LADY: Colonel who?
PENN: The System Command Processor, it's the brain.
TSSL: Cancer, brain, brain, cancer!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The scientific paper doesn't say your brain boots like a computer; an ignorant journalist has misinterpreted it.
Your brain doesn't boot. It never ever shuts down, at least, until you die. Once it shuts down, you AREN'T going to reboot it. At best, it goes into "sleep mode", which is quite different than your laptop's sleep mode. Your computer doesn't dream when it's in sleep mode, and your brain doesn't shut down when you sleep, not even when you're in a coma.
When you shut off your brain, it doesn't EVER start back up again. It isn't a computer and is nothing whatever like a computer. It isn't elecronic, it's electrochemical. It isn't binary, it's analog. Thought is merely a series of chemical reactions.
Some people think that if you make a complex enough computer it will become sentient. Yeah? How many more beads do I have to string on my binary abacus before it becomes self-aware?
How many more years before the PETA idiots start campaigning for "machine rights"?
Brains don't boot, computers don't think. Somebody needs to give the journalist the boot.
>fdisk -thalamus
>shudown -h now
(reboot)
or else...
>No operating system found.
>Insert system disk and press any key to continue.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Wow, thanks for the link. I guess the paper I found was one by the same author last month in the same journal. I was wondering why the stuff in the paper was so different from what was being described in the article...
Here's the abstract from what you linked:
The brain somehow merges visual information with the behavioral context in which it is being processed, a task that is often attributed to the cerebral cortex. We have identified a new role of the gaseous neurotransmitter, nitric oxide (NO), in the early selective enhancement of corticogeniculate communication that may participate in this process at the level of the thalamus. Visual information is dynamically gated through the thalamus by brainstem neurons that release acetylcholine and NO. Using in vitro electrophysiology, we characterized NO effects on excitatory postsynaptic potentials and currents (EPSCs) elicited from retinal and cortical pathways in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the ferret. NO selectively and reversibly increased cortically-evoked postsynaptic responses, and this effect was mimicked by cyclic guanosine 3',5'-monophosphate (cGMP). Conversely, NO inhibited retinally-evoked responses independently of cGMP. We demonstrated that these differential effects were specific to postsynaptic N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptors by studying treatment effects on pharmacologically isolated EPSCs from each pathway. We propose that when brainstem activity is increased during behavioral arousal or rapid eye movement sleep, NO may increase the relative sensitivity of relay neurons to corticogeniculate feedback. The net effect of these changes in synaptic processing may be to selectively suppress peripheral information while unifying data carried by reentrant corticogeniculate loops with the behavioral context in which the visual information is processed.
Edsgar Dijkstra
While less well known than club bouncers, I would think that the thalamus would be better likened to Maxwell's Demon.
This would explain why all your body heat escape from your head!
When I was young, I hung out with an odd chap that was doing experiments in artificial intellegence. He was doing pattern recognition using an array of gold plated iron dendrites that he grew in solution of high pressure nitric acid. It seemed to be able to recognize geometric shaped at various angles. It is interesting that Dr Stewarts research used Nitric acid and the root article metion nitric oxide.
I have not studied neurology, so apologies for any/all ignorance on my part, but it seems to me that we're only now learning some of the basic mechanics of the brain and are often restricted to a purely qualitative assessment of symptoms (and a purely qualitative assessment of the patient doing the initial qualitative assessment) to determine what is happening.
That we understand the thalamus to any degree is impressive, if I'm correct in my understanding, but I can find no rhyme or reason for my understanding to be the way things actually work. We're far more technologically advanced, but in all of my visits to neurologists or pdocs, I have never seen any meaningful technology in use.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Glad to oblige:
roman_mir:~# shutdown -h +2 'I just want to go to sleep'
Reminds me of a classic:
Brain A is not a system brain.
Abort, Retry, Sleep?
It has a huge security exploit.
Ability to run arbitrary code, all it takes is beer and a female and you got root.
At least in theory.
The brain, like the heart, never stopps during life. You dont boot when you wake up and you dont shutdown when you go to sleep.
The brain does not shutdown even if you are in a coma.
This gives a whole new meaning to "microkernel". And what with microkernel now equivalent to "peakbrain", it looks like neuroscience sides with Linus against RMS and Tannenbaum. :)
I run GNU/thalamus.
If this hurts your feelings, please forgive me... But have you tried formatting the thalamus and installing a better OS than Windows Embedded? I mean, sure, ThalLinux might boot up slower, but it's more stable, so it won't have to do that as much anymore...
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Oblig:
In Soviet Russia, thalmus boots brain
[/sarcasm]
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things...
[/sarcasm]
Detective: So, Doctor, what caused this man to die?
Coroner: Apparently, God created him as a Windows machine and he suffered a massive core dump. It's a chronic occurance in people loaded with Windows. We tried to ask God to fix the problem, but he says that it's normal. We, however, think that he reclassified the bugs as security features just to make the ship date.
Detective: Um.....ok... so, what happens when a core dump occurs in a Windows person?
Coroner: Well, their eyes turn bright blue, their body freezes up, and their bowels relax causing copious amounts of code to be evacuated from their body.
Detective: How are you sure this was a core dump that killed him?
Coroner: Well, the subject has bright blue eyes, a large amount of code in the pants, and facial trauma.
Detective: Facial trauma?
Coroner: Yes, facial trauma. It's caused by the person who was interacting with the subject when the core dump occured. The person isn't sure if what they said got thought to the subject, so they slapped the subject around, because they had the appearance of freezing up.
Detective: What can people do to avoid these things?
Coroner: (holds up a deer rifle)
Detective: (blink)
-----
Sig Sauer
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Why there is no Funny Flaimbait moderation category on slashdot?
My answer to you post would be that God was in a rush, so he created human monolithic kernel ver1.0. Female brain is apparently better at concentraiting on more things at the same time, so kernel ver1.1 shows the direction where the Almighty would eventually go.
I wonder when the kernel patch will be available.
Mat 24:36 But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.
Don't ask me, I'm just hair. Your head ended 18 inches ago.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
This Godwin guy sounds like a Nazi.
The brain also seems to have a 'hard restart'. When I was hit by a car and spun in the air, I remember flying but not landing. My friend saw me still for a couple of seconds, then I shuddered or had convusions that woke me up, as if a general 'move' command was being sent to every muscle in my body.
Later in hospital I was dozing and had a flashback. I saw a violent flash, then the same shuddering or convulsing woke me up. It was as if the brain was protecting me from the trauma of the landing, but keeping me alert afterwards for whatever else might happen.
Sorry, this may or may not have anything to do with the thalmus and nitrous oxide, but I've always wondered about it.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
I like your posts and you certainly have a very agile mind. I'm terribly sorry to read that you suffer from epilepsy. I wish you all the best.
You seem to be well informed, are there any places where I can find more on this? I'm presently researching some new ideas I have on neurofeedback (especially now transcranial stimulation seems to be promising) because I have a totally shot short term, um, memory (OK, bad joke).
:-).
I'm now also getting totally screwed up sleeping patterns so I'm having a map done to see if anything happened (I once fell hard enough to snap my arm in 4 places, and problems have started since so I guess some sand must have shifted
And I do NOT want to go the chemical route, I want to fix this, not become another pharma shareholder sponsor..
= Ch =
Insert
Well.. I think the kernel analogy is far from precise. The kernel (at least the monolithic one) is a far too complex and massive system to be paralelled to the thalamus. I think interrupt-controller is a more suitable analogy. Shit comes in and shit goes out and control is being enforced (to some extent).
Drivers in a kernel would in the brain be something like "control of muscular movement" (cerebellum, parts of cortex, somatic part of the peripheral nervous system, etc...), interfaces would be something like "riding a bike" (using all the "drivers" for muscular movement, balance, memorysystems for planning route, motivational systems for motivation, sensory systems for navigation and real-time collision avoidance, etc...).
The Thalamus is (at least as I see it) an interruptcontroller issuing "interrupt service routines" on a regular basis, telling our brain that we are about to loose our balance or crash into the tree in front of us.
The (brain) kernel is the abstract "mind"/"soul" "thing" that is a mental superorganism made up of all our brains organs.
well... thats just my 2 eurocents.
Am I alone in being reminded of the C64 game developer Thalamus?
Stavros Fasoulas coding cool games, Rob Hubbard crankin out the music...such cool memories of the late 80's! Glad I can still remember some of them...
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion
The thing that really gets me about the brain, that really messes with my head when i think about it, is the fact that due to nerve transmission rates, the amounts of time it takes for the chemical reactions and physical changes to occur in our sensory systems, and whatever other delays occur between outside world and perception from to the nature of the real world, what we perceive is actually the past.
The delay might not be all that much, indeed the fact that we can function the way we do shows that our mental latency is pretty darn low, but we're always a tiny bit behind what's actually happening in reality around us.
if you start thinking about the consequences of this, such as the perceptions during violent/sudden death (ie, a bullet into the brain or getting blown up), or even lesser things like walking into a wall or even just any interaction at ALL with the world, it's really quite awe inspiring to think about the fact that everything we feel, already happened. and, depending on more metaphysical things like the soul or the mind being separate from your body (which is another interesting concept indeed), it might be possible that you're actually already dead, you just don't know it yet. if you get blown up instantly, do you perceive it? or does your mind go away before those nerve signals ever reach it? or if your mind is separate, does it exist up until those signals reach it?
maybe it's just me, but I find that pretty interesting.
ìì!
If you combine the "lag" on the sensotory input (speed of sound, light) and the time the nevrosystem uses to compile a mental image of that stimuli; yes, you can say that we always observe the past. But then again, time being relative and all, you might say that the "lag" is determined by the physical restraints imposed on every living (and nonliving) creature. In that mindset everything is in the past. The present is not a moving point on an axis. The present is a point beyond "the present". It is pulling everything forward (or backwards or upwords or whatever) or (more plausibly) not moving at all.
:P
And the fact that you just expressed a profound philosophical understanding just like that points to a theoretical capacity for an unlimited potential (of the human brain) (despite the restrictions in observing time).
Yes, that's why folding@home runs soooo dawn fast. Like the 20 thousand molecules for second we need to model a small part of the brain.
No, that something can be modelled in a computer doesn't mean it can be modelled in reasonable time.
Besides that, the computations are "reasonable aproximations". They are not exactly like the real thing.
In that sense all the computers in the world are not enough to model a single neuron, unless you abstract some of the processes. And if you abstract something, you are not modeling the real thing, but just doing a mathematical aproximation with some formula. Which is nice, but you have to keep in mind the limitations of your modelling. You can't declare that the modelling is the "real thing" just because "it's science" and it's infallible.
It's like the chapters in CSI where the modelling just don't fit the experimental data because they just missed some things that should be in the model from the start. They change the model and then it fits, but it's too late for the case.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
While this study is the first to identify nitric oxide's role in the thalamus, elsewhere in the body it was already known to have an important, if somewhat different function. The molecule is actually integral to controlling blood flow and is, in fact, the molecule Viagra targets in order to increase blood flow to the penis.
This makes it too easy for women to make a variation of a joke about blood flow that can be in only one place at a time...
the concepts borrowed from "The Human aerial, Dr. Robin Kelly, New Zealand":
The fact that you can fool a kid or a cat of th existence of people insite a TV set explains that our brain is not the seat of conciousness, but just a received of higher frequencies.. things are just perceived as real, and, objects (like electrons in quantum physics) do not exist unless you look at them..
ever heard of a popular saying, the beauty is to the eye of the observer..
anyways, very nice insights into people's minds here in SD. except of course the jerks that compare anything man made to the brain
also, I wanted to mention the behavioural changes that console games inflict into the brain. people get impaired for social interaction.. turm violent as if the frontal lobes were numb.. pre-conditioned just for the task of killing king-kong or whatever..maybe from the constant repetition of movements or scenes in those games? only withdrawing from it helps you regain slowly your more social skills..
this was a good story... picked it up too
what would be the brain equivelant of the Garbage Collector(e.g. removing unused things)?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Garbage collection in the brain means parts of the network get low input and therefore also low output, after which their function slowly deteriorates towards noise, which simplifies their reprogramming. In general, its not good if reconnection happens to large areas of the brain. IANAN
Hey don't blame me, IANAB