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Memory Capacity of Brain is 10 Times Greater than Previously Thought

posted by martyb on Friday January 22 2016, @06:21AM   
from the I-thought-so dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Salk researchers and collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient and could help engineers build computers that are incredibly powerful but also conserve energy.

"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."

Our memories and thoughts are the result of patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain. A key part of the activity happens when branches of neurons, much like electrical wire, interact at certain junctions, known as synapses. An output 'wire' (an axon) from one neuron connects to an input 'wire' (a dendrite) of a second neuron. Signals travel across the synapse as chemicals called neurotransmitters to tell the receiving neuron whether to convey an electrical signal to other neurons. Each neuron can have thousands of these synapses with thousands of other neurons.

Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity (10.7554/eLife.10778)

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Original Submission

• Dogma Dogma (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @10:37AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @10:37AM (#293063)

  An output 'wire' (an axon) from one neuron connects to an input 'wire' (a dendrite) of a second neuron.

  This idea has been opposed since its inception. Here is the 1906 nobel prize winner for neuroscience work going on a rant about it:

  It may seem strange that, since I have always been opposed to the neuron theory - although acknowledging that its starting-point is to be found in my own work - I have chosen this question of the neuron as the subject of my lecture, and that it comes at a time when this doctrine is generally recognized to be going out of favour.

  The subject, however, is still a very important one in spite of these signs of decline; but more than that, it is a very real one, for the majority of physiologists, anatomists and pathologists still support the neuron theory, and no clinician could think himself sufficiently up to date if he did not accept its ideas like articles of faith. It is a subject which deserves to be re-examined all the more because there is a growing tendency to attach to the word neuron a meaning different from the proper one. Many authors, in fact, play on words by substituting the word neuron for nerve cell, and this has now become legalized through common usage and tradition. Admitting that eventual substitution scarcely involves a question of principle and that after all it is nothing new, for continuity between the cell and nerve fibres was already well known, I ought to say that I am against giving a meaning to a word which differs from that given it by the person who introduced the word into science.

  http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1906/golgi-lecture.html [nobelprize.org]

  Here is the thing. If you carefully look at Gogli-Cox stained tissue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgi%27s_method [wikipedia.org] ), you see tons of dendrodendritic connections. These are not exceptional in any way, they are everywhere. We also know cytoplasm can be continuous between two cells ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_junction [wikipedia.org] ). It should be no means be taken as fact that viewing the brain as a collection of neurons is the most productive approach.

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• Re:Dogma (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2016, @09:57AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2016, @09:57AM (#293579)

  An output 'wire' (an axon) from one neuron connects to an input 'wire' (a dendrite) of a second neuron.

  This idea has been opposed since its inception. Here is the 1906 nobel prize winner for neuroscience work going on a rant about it:

  Its not a 1:1. An axon connects to many dendrites of many second neurons.

  Parent