Here's an article to check out:
"Brain Cells, Doing Their Job With Some Neighborly Help" By BENEDICT CAREY December 25, 2007, New York Times
From the article:
“Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland stimulated not a single cell but a single dendritic spine, one of the hairlike growths that sprout from a cell’s branching arms.
Brain cells communicate with their neighbors by sending a chemical burst from the tips of these spines, across a space called the synapse to the tip of a spine on the next cell. If the chemical bath is strong enough, the receiving spine bulges forward — strengthening the connection between the spines. This is thought to be the fundamental process underlying learning.
But the researchers, Christopher D. Harvey and Karel Svoboda, found something unusual when they stimulated a single spine. Not only did the spine bulge, but it also somehow made its neighbors more sensitive to chemical signals — standing ready, in effect, to digest any spillover of information. Imagine every neighbor on the block calling up to offer a corner of his basement for storage, just in case.
The combined effect of these helpers multiplies the capacity of any single brain cell, the authors concluded. Neuroscientists had theorized that this effect, called clustered plasticity, might help account for the tremendous capacity of the brain, but they had not seen it in action.”
Ok, I know I'm a bit offbeat, but doesn't that remind you of the way social networking goes? I'm seeing all sorts of parallels...
Anyone else?
(And somehow I think this could be a great source of comedy, too, or could be a dance, a musical piece, a poem.) So many ideas to bat around,
Tags: New+York+Times, brain+cells, brain+functioning, networking
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