If our neurons are so damned smart why don't our doctors know how to engage them to get to our 100% recovery? Your doctor needs to answer that question, keep asking until an answer comes, it will take 30 years at best.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=135850&CultureCode=en
When you look at the hands of a clock or the streets on a map, your
brain is effortlessly performing computations that tell you about the
orientation of these objects. New research by UCL scientists has shown
that these computations can be carried out by the microscopic branches
of neurons known as dendrites, which are the receiving elements of
neurons.
The study, published today (Sunday) in Nature and carried
out by researchers based at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical
Research at UCL, the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge
and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examined neurons in
areas of the mouse brain which are responsible for processing visual
input from the eyes. The scientists achieved an important breakthrough:
they succeeded in making incredibly challenging electrical and optical
recordings directly from the tiny dendrites of neurons in the intact
brain while the brain was processing visual information.
These recordings revealed that visual stimulation produces specific
electrical signals in the dendrites – bursts of spikes – which are tuned
to the properties of the visual stimulus.
The results challenge the widely held view that this kind of
computation is achieved only by large numbers of neurons working
together, and demonstrate how the basic components of the brain are
exceptionally powerful computing devices in their own right.
Senior author Professor Michael Hausser commented: “This work shows
that dendrites, long thought to simply ‘funnel’ incoming signals towards
the soma, instead play a key role in sorting and interpreting the
enormous barrage of inputs received by the neuron. Dendrites thus act as
miniature computing devices for detecting and amplifying specific types
of input.
“This new property of dendrites adds an important new element to the
“toolkit” for computation in the brain. This kind of dendritic
processing is likely to be widespread across many brain areas and indeed
many different animal species, including humans.”
Funding for this study was provided by the Gatsby Charitable
Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the European Research Council, as
well as the Human Frontier Science Program, the Klingenstein Foundation,
Helen Lyng White, the Royal Society, and the Medical Research Council.
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