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'Giant' Neuron Regulates 50,000 Other Neurons
Scottingham sends this quote from PhysOrg:
"A single interneuron controls activity adaptively in 50,000 neurons, enabling consistently sparse codes for odors (abstract). The brain is a coding machine: it translates physical inputs from the world into visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile perceptions via the mysterious language of its nerve cells and the networks which they form. Neural codes could in principle take many forms, but in regions forming bottlenecks for information flow (e.g., the optic nerve) or in areas important for memory, sparse codes are highly desirable. ... This single giant interneuron tracks in real time the activity of several tens of thousands of neurons in an olfactory centre and feeds inhibition back onto all of them, so as to maintain their collective output within an appropriately sparse regime. In this way, representation sparseness remains steady as input intensity or complexity varies."
... he might know a thing or two about this...
C|N>K
What happens if this single neuron fails/is damaged?
I wonder how much more similar P2P networks/algorithms are when compared to wetware neural networks like the brain...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
This obviously the work of blind chance and natural forces operating over time. And we make fun by invoking the FSM...
I wonder if this is related to the loss of taste/smell for a few months after you get certain viruses.
This summary is really confusing. Someone should write an article about something like this. I would read it.
This single giant interneuron tracks in real time the activity of several tens of thousands of neurons in an olfactory centre and feeds inhibition back onto all of them, so as to maintain their collective output within an appropriately sparse regime.
Key part of the article that is not in the small summary...
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt have now discovered a single neuron in the brain of locusts that enables the adaptive regulation of sparseness in olfactory codes
Dominance of one input over the others and focus at the expense of seeing the overall picture.
It's the tunnel-vision neuron. And it's intentional.
Fascinating.
The more I read about the brain the more I see a future where we're tailoring "specialized" people who might process specific types of information with vast superiority while debilitating themselves in other areas. I could see area's where say an engineer would have highly developed logical/mathmatical ability while maybe gimping himself in auditory processing or something. Which actually seems something like self induced autism.
GENESIS is a neural net that simulates biological neural networks rather than comp-sci ones. It is also so horribly complex that they've rebuilt it from the ground up three times. If they now have to handle supernodes, active queue management and load balancing, they'll be on version 4 before 3 even gets past the alpha releases. This is not an insignificant change.
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)
does this explain telepathy, yet?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Since the summary is somewhat ...lacking, here's my attempt to translate it. (Disclaimer: I am not a neuroscientist, and I really only skimmed it anyway.)
"We studied the olfactory system of locusts, and found that all of the smell information seems to pass through a single neuron with a lot of incoming connections. This single neuron does not send outgoing signals in spikes as most other neurons do, but instead releases a chemical that suppresses other neurons. It uses this method to sort-of "average" all of the incoming signals together. Also, this system involves a feedback loop. We think that this whole arrangement is set up to generate sparse-codes, which is our favorite way to reduce information down to a small number of dimensional values. We hope that mammals use similar systems, and that this might eventually help lead to an understanding of how brains reduce large amounts of information into small concepts."
For many reasons, there is almost certainly nothing like this in the mammalian brain.
But the comment still stands.
In Soviet Russian Giant Neuron regulates YOU!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You mean if I clobber a few interneurons I'll have better luck with the ladies?
I for one welcome our--oooh somebody's barbequing somewhere.
This research stinks!
That is all.
That's not coding. That's just conversion (or parsing).
Even the AI Mind in JavaScript uses inhibition for electronic brain function, not for enforcing a sparse olfacotry environment, but rather to suppress just-past thoughts in favor of yet-to-emerge thoughts.
Would that be qualified as a kind of squelching (from radio communications)?
So the brain has volume controls. So what? Makes sense to me.
(But I have to throw in: for humans anyway, the optical nerve is a "bottleneck" about like a TB network connection is in a typical office. If that's a "bottleneck", give me more.)
Which reminds me, we should all visit the Brain Slug planet, and wander about without helmets.
This sort of makes sense to me....a million flowers won't overload your nose and partially incapacitate you, but a giant spotlight on your eyes or a jumbo jet next to your ear will.