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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 14 2017, @11:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-tiny-living-wires dept.

The brain has more computational capacity than previously thought, according to UCLA researchers:

Dendrites have been considered simple passive conduits of signals. But by working with animals that were moving around freely, the UCLA team showed that dendrites are in fact electrically active — generating nearly 10 times more spikes than the soma (neuron cell body). The finding, reported [DOI: 10.1126/science.aaj1497] [DX] in the March 9 issue of the journal Science, challenges the long-held belief that spikes in the soma are the primary way in which perception, learning and memory formation occur.

"Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue," said UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta, the study's senior author. "Knowing they are much more active than the soma fundamentally changes the nature of our understanding of how the brain computes information. This is a major departure from what neuroscientists have believed for about 60 years," said Mehta, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, of neurology and of neurobiology.

Because the dendrites are nearly 100 times larger in volume than the neuronal centers, Mehta said, the large number of dendritic spikes taking place could mean that the brain has more than 100 times the computational capacity than was previously thought.

Is that your final answer?


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  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday March 15 2017, @07:38PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 15 2017, @07:38PM (#479546) Journal

    The analogy doesn't really work because the traces on the motherboard aren't 90% of the components in/on the mainboard. I never gave a lot of thought to the metal distribution inside the computer, but off-hand, I'd say the traces are probably 40% or less. (Discounting the case, the mounts, and housings for hard drives - we're only concerning ourselves with the mainboard and it's components.)

    Yeah, not the best analogy. Forgive an old graybeard who remembers learning programming on a PDP-8 minicomputer the size of a refrigerator. Its logic was constructed of Flip Chips" [wikipedia.org]. It also had a whopping 24K 12-bit words of core memory [wikipedia.org]. Then came "personal" computers like the IMSAI-8080. Back in those days, the traces on the motherboard were much larger, and the discrete(!) components (like resistors, caps, and TTL chips) were far less 'capable'. Things are a tad bit different these days, as you kindly pointed out.

    So, I stand/sit corrected, and thank you for a trip down memory lane, as well!

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