The human brain is the most complex organ we know. So much so that it is perhaps less what we know than what we don’t. One of the great unknowns about its functioning is how the billions of neurons that work in our brain manage to coordinate in a network with trillions of connections.
Multiscale organization. Now a new study has revealed new details about how neurons are organized in the human brain to perform their tasks in a coordinated manner.
High performance. In an article for The Conversationresearcher at the University of Sydney and co-author of the study Brandon Robert Munn, explains with an analogy the amazing way our brain cells work. “It’s a bit like being a worker in a high-performance business,” he compares.
Munn refers to the fact that neurons must maintain a balance between individual skills and teamwork. The question for the team was how the neurons achieved the right balance.
40%-50%. The study of this “work balance” revealed that neurons dedicated between 40% and 50% of their work to “individual tasks”, while the rest was allocated to “team work”. One of the most striking points of the study is the fact that this organizational pattern is by no means exclusive to the human brain but can be observed in very diverse species within the animal kingdom.
The team observed this division of labor in invertebrates such as fruit flies or some nematodes, as well as in mammals such as mice and apes. That is, animals separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution have maintained this organizational form, explains Munn. If something works, don’t change it.
Fractals. The study revealed a “fractal structure” in the functioning of the brain. That is, a structure in which cells create networks that in turn are integrated into larger networks until an organism is created, so that work patterns are similar regardless of the scale at which we find ourselves.
Visualizing through calcium. To study the way neurons work, the team turned to calcium visualization. It is a tool halfway between the analysis of neurons at a cellular level and brain analyzes that allow us to see how entire regions of the brain are activated or deactivated.
This methodology allows several tens of thousands of neurons to be studied in real time, using fluorescent sensors that measure calcium levels in the cells, explains Munn. Details of the work were published in an article in the magazine Cell.
Adapt or die. The team went beyond this analysis and also performed simulations of neural activity under the observed circumstances. They thus verified that this “fractal division” optimized the performance of brain activity.
This strategy would have allowed not only optimization of resources but great adaptability. Perhaps that is why it has become a strategy present in brains separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, like the nearly billion years that separate flies from humans.
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