Fun Stuff > CHATTER
ATTN: Americans: Bend over!
onewheelwizzard:
Nodaisho, it's still only September, they're just trying to give you a sense of wonder about the field ("see how weird things can be? Aren't you interested?")
Anyway, the brain is definitely not digital. With 20-30-some different primary chemical messengers determining when and how and how fast any neuron fires, each of them acting at different receptor sites, some of them inhibitory, some of them excitatory, thousands of input and output connections per neuron, and a whole bunch of other factors involved, it's really not an "on-off" system.
Nodaisho:
I bet that if you break it down far enough, though, it is a very very complex binary system, you just have to be able to keep looking deep enough. We might not know enough yet to find it, though.
I think that being able to figure out what makes people tick would be far more interesting than looking at pictures of the brain. The closest thing that happened to that so far was the teacher doing a cold reading on the first day of class, he printed out the exact same description, which read like a horoscope, for each person, supposedly analyzing them.
In one page, we have gone from gas to psychology, you all should be proud of yourselves.
onewheelwizzard:
No, the chemical nature of the neurotransmitter system makes for a level of unpredictability that separates it from being a binary system. See, a neuron firing isn't just an electrical zap. That happens within a neuron (chemically I might add, it's a really complicated process, all K+ ions and voltage-gated channels and shit) but the actual means of communicating to other neurons is through chemical release. That chemical release is just too sloppy of a communication system to make neuron-to-neuron communication a binary process, especially since some of these chemicals act against others. Basically, a neuron only fires if the voltage difference between the inside of the cell and what's happening outside of it gets pushed beyond a certain point, and THAT process is moderated by OTHER chemical messengers that receive the neurotransmitters from other neurons and then affect the inside of the cell in a whole separate variety of ways. It's just not a strict action-reaction situation, it's much too organic for that. Saying the brain is essentially a binary system is like saying humanity is essentially a really complicated species of mold.
öde:
Humanity is a virus, haven't you seen the Matrix? (I am too classy to put an eye-rolling emoticon or 'rolls eyes' in asterisks, so I'm putting this here in case someone thought I wasn't joking)
jhocking:
Have you ever seen a picture of a Rube Goldberg machine? The brain is kinda like that.
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