Hidden Computational Power Found in the Arms of Neurons

 Hidden Computational Power Found in the Arms of Neurons :- 

 The dendritic arms of the some human neurons can be perform logic operations that once seemed to require a whole neural networks.

Published:-

January 14, 2020 by Jordana Cepelewicz

Source:- Quanta Magazine 

Yiota Poirazi

Yiota Poirazi, is a computational neuroscientist at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in Greece, is one of the famous researchers who recognized that the signals measured in dendrites might mean that some neurons that are operated as a multi-layer information-processing network.

The information-processing capabilities of the brain are often reported to reside in the trillions of connections that are wire its neurons altogether. But over the past few decades, mounting research has quietly shifted some of the attention to individual neurons, which seems to shoulder much more computational responsibility than once seemed imaginable. 

 The recently in a long line of evidence comes from scientists’ and they  discover of a new types of electrical signal in the upper layers of the human cortex. The Laboratory and modeling studies have already been shown that tiny compartments in the dendritic arms of cortical neurons. And they can each perform complicated operations in the some mathematical logics. But now it seems that individual dendritic compartments can also  be perform a particular computation, “exclusive OR” it is a mathematical theorists that had previously categorized as unsolvable by single-neuron systems. 

The limitations on Dumb Neutrons:- 

In the year of  1940s and ’50s, there is a picture began to dominate neuroscience, and  that of the “dumb” neuron, is a simple integrator, that is a point in a network that merely summed up its inputs. Branched extensions of the cell, called dendrites, and they would receive thousands of signals from the neighboring neurons, some excitatory and some inhibitory. In the body of the neurons, all those signals would be weighted and tallied, and if the total exceeded some threshold, the neurons are fired is a series of electrical pulses and that is directed to the stimulation of the adjacent neurons. 

Original source:- Quanta Magazine 
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