For many years, neuroscience has used different tools to try to hear conversations about neurons. Just as linguists decipher an unknown language, scientists try to decode neural activation patterns to study the grammar of the brain, and in these attempts they seem to have found new protagonists: dendrites.
The latest research seems to show that neuroscience, when estimating the capacity of our brain, only scrapes the surface of knowledge, ucLA university has discovered a hidden layer of neural communication through dendrites, leading us to assume that the brain’s capacity can be up to 100 times greater than science had imagined.
- This discovery can drastically change the foundations of conventional neuroscience.
- Until a few months ago.
- They were backed by the belief that dendrites were like passive cables carrying electrical signals to the neural body (soma).
- But this research has shown that they are much more than that.
- Dendrites generate their electrical signals at peaks that are five times larger and more frequent than spikes in neuron nuclei.
We are talking about a very radical change in the knowledge of neuroscience about brain functioning, among other things, it is possible that learning processes occur at the dendritic level, not in the sums of neurons.
Conventional neuroscience believes that electrical signals emitted by cellular bodies are the basis of our cognitive abilities. It is now known that dendrites do not have a passive function and also emit their own electrical signals.
While this was not surprising in itself, the researchers found that dendrites are also intelligent, they are able to adapt their electrical plug over time, this type of plasticity had only been observed previously in neural bodies, suggesting that dendrites are able to learn.
Because they are much more active than the cell body, we can begin to understand that much of the information generated in a neuron occurs in the dendrites, without informing the cell body, that is, the dendrites can act as a processing unit and information processing. An independence that, until a few months ago, was unthinkable.
“It’s like suddenly discovering that the cables that connect your computer’s processor can also process information. “Mayank R. Mehta, director of research?
Dr. Mayank R. Mehta’s research team has created a system to place electrodes near the dendrites of mice, this system allows to capture the electrical signals of the animal during the time that it is awake and performs its daily activities, as well as during sleep. , were able to monitor the electrical activity of the dendrites for four consecutive days and transmit it live to computers.
The electrodes were implanted in the area of the brain related to movement planning, the posterior parietal cortex, what they were able to capture was that during sleep periods the electrical signals looked like irregular waves and each reached a peak.
That is, while the rats slept, the dendrites spoke to each other and did so by electric shocks up to five times faster than those of cell bodies. During wakefulness periods, the firing speed is multiplied by ten.
Another striking finding of this research was the type of signal emitted by the dendrites. The electrical signals of the dendrites can be numerical, but they have also shown large fluctuations, almost twice as much as the spines themselves. This type of wide fluctuation shows that Dendrite also has analog computational activity, which has never been seen in any neural activity model.
It is thought that this type of dendrite emission may be related to time and space; observing the behavior of rats in a maze distinguished two types of signals, one in the form of cell body spikes in anticipation of behavior. case, it was before I turned the corner. Meanwhile, the dendrites sent their computational signals just as the animal was turning the corner.
Neuroscience seems to underestimate the brain’s computing ability. From the point of view of volume and the fact that the dendrites are 100 times larger than the sum, we could assume that the brain actually has a processing capacity 100 times greater than we imagined. It seems that the neuron is no longer the basic computational unit of the brain, as the dendrites have taken its place.