Introducing the brain: human vs animal traffic patterns (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, December 18, 2023, 17:07 (131 days ago) @ David Turell

We have many more parallel patterns:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-12-parallel-traffic-human-brains-animals.html

"In a study comparing human brain communication networks with those of macaques and mice, EPFL researchers found that only the human brains transmitted information via multiple parallel pathways, yielding new insights into mammalian evolution.

"When describing brain communication networks, EPFL senior postdoctoral researcher Alessandra Griffa likes to use travel metaphors. Brain signals are sent from a source to a target, establishing a polysynaptic pathway that intersects multiple brain regions "like a road with many stops along the way."

"She explains that structural brain connectivity pathways have already been observed based on networks ("roads") of neuronal fibers. But as a scientist in the Medical Image Processing Lab (MIP:Lab) in EPFL's School of Engineering, and a research coordinator at CHUV's Leenaards Memory Centre, Griffa wanted to follow patterns of information transmission to see how messages are sent and received.

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"The researchers' approach revealed that in the non-human brains, information was sent along a single "road", while in humans, there were multiple parallel pathways between the same source and target. Furthermore, these parallel pathways were as unique as fingerprints, and could be used to identify individuals.

"'Such parallel processing in human brains has been hypothesized, but never observed before at a whole-brain level," Griffa summarizes.

"Griffa says that the beauty of the researchers' model is its simplicity, and its inspiration of new perspectives and research avenues in evolution and computational neuroscience. For example, the findings can be linked to the expansion of human brain volume over time, which has given rise to more complex connectivity patterns.

"'We could hypothesize that these parallel information streams allow for multiple representations of reality, and the ability to perform abstract functions specific to humans."

"She adds that although this hypothesis is only speculative, as the Nature Communications study involved no testing of subjects' computational or cognitive ability, these are questions that she would like to explore in the future.

"'We looked at how information travels, so an interesting next step would be to model more complex processes to study how information is combined and processed in the brain to create something new.'"

Comment: one issue is size, another is number of neurons, but the key is the roadmap of enhanced networking of the neurons' connectivity. Networking complexity creates a greater basis for immaterial conceptualization.