Prof. Moshe Ables - Director of the Brain Research Center, "Rosh Gadol" magazine
20,000 nerve cells are found in every cubic millimeter of our cerebral cortex. They communicate simultaneously with each other through a network of nerve extensions about 4 km long and about a billion contact points. Sound complicated? Try to imagine what is happening in the whole brain. To begin to understand what is happening in the brain, you must first find out what code the cells are talking about. However, even when we know, at the molecular level, what happens in a single nerve cell, we still have a problem making sense of the system as a whole. This is because the more complex the system becomes, it becomes clear that the operation of the whole is always more than one or another combination of the sum of the parts. So even the organization of small networks in simple animals, still does not teach us about the connection between nerve cells in a developed animal. That's why we want to investigate what is the key with which it is possible to jump from the level of individual nerve cells or small networks, to what happens in developed brains.
The Mammalian Leap Forward
It is generally assumed that the cerebral cortex developed in mammals at a more accelerated rate than in other animals. This is the most important part used for the higher functions. If it were possible to reconstruct the entire information highway of the brain in its connections and properties, we would probably be able to understand how the brain works. But due to the great complexity of the brain, the chance of doing this tends to zero.
The main stumbling block to understanding the brain is understanding the code with which the cells send messages to each other. Communication in the brain is electrical and takes place through pulses that last a millisecond. Each such pulse looks like a spike of a voltage jump. But what do they "say"? What kind of information do they communicate to each other?
What happens there can be described using the following image: Imagine that a group of aliens arrives on Earth and tries to understand the human vision mechanism. These aliens are equipped with minimal simple vision that can be used to distinguish only one point in space. Those aliens take a newspaper page to the laboratory in an attempt to decipher what is written on it. If they scan the page using a single dot of light and dark they will find that there are white dots and there are black dots, depending on where you look. They will conclude that the code of this thing that humans are interested in is the density of the black dots. This is analogous to physiologists who conduct an experiment by connecting a single electrode to the brain, examining what one nerve cell does and trying to understand the entire brain based on this. But if those aliens were to develop a technique by which they could simultaneously observe multiple dots they would be able to discern patterns of repeating black dots. This is the case of more advanced research in the study of the brain that tries to check with the help of several electrodes the activity in several nerve cells at the same time. The research I am engaged in focuses on identifying these combinations and trying to understand what is behind them.
Ami and Tami - neural computing
Many of the computer scientists involved in brain research came to the conclusion that if it were possible to attach a label to each lug that also indicates which cells it cooperates with, it would be possible to do far-reaching things that have implications for various processes such as reading, language comprehension and learning disabilities. For example: in the sentence "Ami gave Tami a book" each word has a group of cells that represents it. To decipher the sentence you need to know who the participating cells are but also the order of their appearance. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify which groups of cells represent the word that defines the one given by 'Ami', which cells represent the definition of the one given by 'Tami' and which cells represent the given essence, in this case - a book. Only then does it make sense.
The brain perceives many things at the same time but only a small part of them join together to represent a certain concept. For example, when you see a red square and a green circle. The decoding of the shapes is done in one area and the decoding of the color in another area, but the identification is done at the same time. How is this done? How are things going? One question is how we learn based on experience and another question is how we use the acquired knowledge. How, for example, do we use this knowledge to identify objects?
trying to understand
In order to understand which mechanisms enable the connection between different factors into a single entity, we engage in the examination of voluntary movements such as reaching out to grasp a cup. Reaching and grasping is one process in which a continuous link of simultaneous actions is carried out to reach a certain goal. Some believe that the ability to chain actions in a coordinated manner is what ultimately led to the verbal ability of man and hence an understanding of the process will lead to an understanding of our elaborate speech puzzle. This is what we are trying to do with neural computing. The uniqueness of this tool is expressed in 3 layers:
The first is looking from the general to the individual. The assumption is that the rule is greater than the sum of its parts and therefore general models must be built that describe how the nerve cells that mutually influence each other behave, and then see if the principle is also true for the brain.
The second calls for data analysis. Since this is a huge amount of data, techniques must be developed to process the data and reduce the observations so that the results obtained in the end will be on topics that interest the researchers.
The third concerns the subject of simulation, how to simulate with the help of computer software a network that will reflect as accurately as possible what is happening in the brain network.
These tools allow us to get closer step by step to a more comprehensive and better understanding of what is happening in the brain and thus also the ability to assist in the rehabilitation of those whose brains have been damaged in one way or another.
Prof. Ables is one of the recipients of the A.M.T. For 2004, he held the Shimon Chair at Bar Ilan University and the Mina and Arens Spiegel Chair in Neurophysiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
One response
Since this is a huge amount of data, techniques must be developed to process the data and reduce the observations so that the results obtained in the end will be on topics that interest the researchers,
There are gray cells in the brain that are responsible for processing information, maybe their behavior pattern indicates the answer, I don't understand that much in the field but it's a shot in the dark