A New Paradigm For How The Brain Works

[AlchoPwn]

For over 100 years now human beings have thought that everything abut the brain could be explained by way of electrochemical impulses within it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_neuroscience
Humanity has known about neurons since the 1890s thanks to early pioneers in the field, and science has gradually produced a better understanding about how various chemical exchanges allow the neurons to fire, but everything has focused on the primacy of the electrical nature of the brain and the nervous system. That may be about to change completely.

Thomas Heimburg, Professor for Biophysics at Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen,
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-heimburg-147a827/?locale=de_DE
has brought a good deal of what we thought we knew about the human nervous system into question. The fact is that, while we understood a great deal about neurons, that the model wasn't nearly predictive enough to be considered definitive.

Now, what Heimburg is proposing is not that there is no electrical activity within the nerves, but that it plays a different role to that which we had previously believed. Specifically that the electrical impulses do not turn nerves "on", but turn them "off". Instead he proposes that nerves act more like cells in a liquid crystal display television, and that fatty liquid within the neurons become chemically crystalized, producing a mechanical shockwave which activates the nervous system in relay, much like dropping a ton of bricks in a canal causes a shock wave. The electrics then activate to decrystalize the fats back into liquid again allowing for future signals. This is a gross analogous simplification of the actual process of course, but may serve as a very basic introduction for people who are new to the information.

I bring this to your attention as this idea is very fresh, and may well overtake the current views on how the nervous system works. It is also supported by a good deal of experimental data. In particular it offers a better explanation of how anesthetics work, and that has been a field with many anomalies for decades. For those with a long term interest in the field and who have known for years that there is something badly wrong with the orthodox theory, it provides a tantalizing alternative to an entrenched theory that doesn't answer enough anymore.

The paper, On Soliton Propagation in Biomembranes and Nerves:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7750401_On_soliton_propagation_in_biomembranes_and_nerves

Related info:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-thermodynamics-thought-soliton-spikes-heimburg-jackson.html

Be warned, you must be ready to dive into wikipedia after the various terms you may not understand, for there may be many. Foremost among these is the notion of a "soliton":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton

Youtube video:

 

[Coal]

A couple of year back I wrote a paper on implicit and explicit memory and found a couple of papers discussing a low frequency voltage wave that traversed the brain apparently outside of the normal/expected mechanisms, so this feels like a follow-on from that.

There was a bit of recent work at the time which also highlighted that the prevailing theory, that the two memorys type were located in different areas of the brain, was flawed and that once MRI results had been reviewed with proper attention to MRI sensitivity and noise levels, there was practically no evidence for them being in different locations.

If one overlays a classic 'hardware' model on this, this makes sense, as I'd always rather thought that explicit memories are those for which you can recall the location (or 'address') of the memory (or 'data') and implicit memories are those which require an 'address' to be supplied (by context). But the memory or data is in the same 'place'.

 

[EnolaGaia]

A couple of year back I wrote a paper on implicit and explicit memory and found a couple of papers discussing a low frequency voltage wave that traversed the brain apparently outside of the normal/expected mechanisms, so this feels like a follow-on from that.

A footnote ... I seem to recall (no puns intended ... ) reading about one or more such discriminable low frequency meta-waves as far back as the 1980's (and maybe earlier). At the time, they were simply reported as observations, and any explanation of their possible significance was deferred.

There was a bit of recent work at the time which also highlighted that the prevailing theory, that the two memorys type were located in different areas of the brain, was flawed and that once MRI results had been reviewed with proper attention to MRI sensitivity and noise levels, there was practically no evidence for them being in different locations.

Part of the problem has been the bias induced by the once-prevalent / still-ubiquitous framing of human cognitive facilities in terms of elements drawn from computers and IT (i.e., the HIP paradigm). This led to a misguided presumption that distinctions drawn with regard to functions or operations (e.g., 'short-term' versus 'long-term') must be reflected in distinctions involving structure / location.

If one overlays a classic 'hardware' model on this, this makes sense, as I'd always rather thought that explicit memories are those for which you can recall the location (or 'address') of the memory (or 'data') and implicit memories are those which require an 'address' to be supplied (by context). But the memory or data is in the same 'place'.

This resonates with the position I finally adopted 20 - 25 years ago. IMHO 'it's all in there', and the apparent distinctions have more to do with 'retrieval' or 'indexing' than the presence / availability of the 'data' per se.

 

[Coal]

This resonates with the position I finally adopted 20 - 25 years ago. IMHO 'it's all in there', and the apparent distinctions have more to do with 'retrieval' or 'indexing' than the presence / availability of the 'data' per se.

Exactly so. I suspect 'data' is encoded as part of 'location', the two are bound together in some way.

 

[AlchoPwn]

A couple of year back I wrote a paper on implicit and explicit memory and found a couple of papers discussing a low frequency voltage wave that traversed the brain apparently outside of the normal/expected mechanisms, so this feels like a follow-on from that.

It sounds like you brushed up against the mechanical wave, like many other people. I personally brushed up against it from the perspective of the theoretical disconnect in anesthesia, with a small pharma company I was working for.

Part of the problem has been the bias induced by the once-prevalent / still-ubiquitous framing of human cognitive facilities in terms of elements drawn from computers and IT (i.e., the HIP paradigm). This led to a misguided presumption that distinctions drawn with regard to functions or operations (e.g., 'short-term' versus 'long-term') must be reflected in distinctions involving structure / location.

Agreed. In Descarte's day, they wanted the nervous system to be made of clockwork and pressurized hoses. People like to explain systems with analogies of things they know (but the map is not the territory). Heimburg has already been heavily criticized by a phalanx of orthodoxy. Peer review at its best; his ideas are gaining more traction as a result.

 

[Coal]

It sounds like you brushed up against the mechanical wave, like many other people. I personally brushed up against it from the perspective of the theoretical disconnect in anesthesia, with a small pharma company I was working for.

The first discusses how the different memory types are a function of process rather location:

Schacter, D. L. (1992). Implicit knowledge: new perspectives on unconscious
processes.

This is just interesting:

McClelland, J. L. (2011). Memory as a constructive process: The parallel-distributed
processing approach.

This the paper I alluded to about a single LF wave.

Qiu, C., Shivacharan, R. S., Zhang, M., & Durand, D. M. (2015). Can Neural Activity
Propagate by Endogenous Electrical Field?

They are not the newest papers, but they are some I used at the time.

 

[AlchoPwn]

They are not the newest papers, but they are some I used at the time.

I am certain you don't need to justify yourself or the papers in question. The age of a scientific paper is not a measure of its quality or its pertinence. For example, the Scientific American article on Heimburg mentions a 1942 paper involving "drunken tadpoles in a hyperbaric chamber" that show inactivity or loss of anesthesia under differing pressures. When I have the time I will find and read the articles you suggested Coal, and thanks.

 

[Cochise]

A footnote ... I seem to recall (no puns intended ... ) reading about one or more such discriminable low frequency meta-waves as far back as the 1980's (and maybe earlier). At the time, they were simply reported as observations, and any explanation of their possible significance was deferred.

Part of the problem has been the bias induced by the once-prevalent / still-ubiquitous framing of human cognitive facilities in terms of elements drawn from computers and IT (i.e., the HIP paradigm). This led to a misguided presumption that distinctions drawn with regard to functions or operations (e.g., 'short-term' versus 'long-term') must be reflected in distinctions involving structure / location.

Agree. And IMO this is why attempts to produce so-called 'artificial intelligence' are so far unwieldy and not very successful except where applied to rigidly limited functions. The brain and computers do not work the same way. For one thing the brain can actually 'reprogram' itself if it has some function left, as many a person who has partly or wholly recovered from serious brain damage can bear witness.

I've done a lot of pondering on 'layers of abstraction' - it is important to separate the way a user perceives functionality from the way it is actually implemented to cope with the mechanical/physical limits of the hardware. (or wetware, in the case of the brain)

This resonates with the position I finally adopted 20 - 25 years ago. IMHO 'it's all in there', and the apparent distinctions have more to do with 'retrieval' or 'indexing' than the presence / availability of the 'data' per se.

Spot on. I may be biased as I have spent a substantial amount of my career writing database retrieval / update code - actual indexing algorithms and such - still doing it now in fact. It's that as we get older its the 'indexes' that get cluttered, not that the data is lost.

I also have pointed out that current has more attributes than its presence or absence, and if the brain is capable of using the strength of a current or charge rather than simply presence or absence (negative or positive) then that may go some way to explaining how it can store a lifetime's experience in a small space, and how it could 'learn' by increasing some voltages/charges while reducing others.

Grossly over-simplifying, of course.

 

[Coal]

It's that as we get older its the 'indexes' that get cluttered, not that the data is lost.

Yes I think that. I'm biased by my own peripatetic upbringing as it seems to me I can recall a lot of past information by association with many different places. I have many 'strong indexes', so to speak. I'd argue that despite being a 'sample size of one' I can't be unique in this respect.

I also have pointed out that current has more attributes than its presence or absence, and if the brain is capable of using the strength of a current or charge rather than simply presence or absence (negative or positive) then that may go some way to explaining how it can store a lifetime's experience in a small space, and how it could 'learn' by increasing some voltages/charges while reducing others.

In effect, an analogue computer, which one might expect, given the nature of the 'hardware'.

In the early '80's I but a number of basic analogue computers, using IC's that don't exist now (as they don't need to). These IC's would (for example) add two wave-forms or square a wave-form and so on.

Grossly over-simplifying, of course.

Heh. True dat.