"How the brain is organized to help make decisions is a big, fundamental question, and theneural circuitry—how neurons are connected to one another—in brain areas that are important for decision-making isn't well understood," said Wei-Chung Allen Lee, associate professor of neurobiology in t...
For the nervous system to function, neurons must be able to send and receive signals. These signals are possible because each neuron has a charged cellular membrane (a voltage difference between the inside and the outside), and the charge of this membrane can change in response to neurotransmit...
Neurons are connected to each other through synapses, sites where signals are transmitted in the form of chemical messengers. Reinhard Jahn, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, has investigated precisely how the process works. Our nervous system consists of ...
From Neurons to Nodes Now that we've laid the groundwork for how neural networks function, we can start to look at some of the specifics. The basic structure of an artificial neural network looks like this: Each of the circles is called a "node" and it simulates a single neuron. On...
The transistors in a computer are wired in relatively simple, serial chains (each one is connected to maybe two or three others in basic arrangements known as logic gates), whereas the neurons in a brain are densely interconnected in complex, parallel ways (each one is connected to perhaps ...
Neurons themselves are simple and perform basic mathematical functions to normalize their outputs between 1 and 0 or -1 and 1. They become powerful, however, when they’re connected to each other. Neurons are arranged in layers in a neural network and each neuron passes on values to the ...
Neurons have different shapes depending on what they do. Motor neurons that control muscle contractions have a cell body on one end, a long axon in the middle and dendrites on the other end; sensory neurons have dendrites on both ends, connected by a long axon with a cell body in the ...
But first, we have to know what to scan. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, connected by at least a hundred trillion synapses. The pattern of connectivity among the brain’s neurons, that is, all of the neurons and all their connections to each other, is called the connec...
(SFO) region. When animals are thirsty, these neurons are highly active; drinking water rapidly calms them down. But the SFO thirst neurons are not directly connected to any gut neurons, so the team aims to figure out how changes in osmolality are communicated to the SFO thirst neurons. ...
If you're familiar with thegut-brain axis, you're likely aware of the growing body of scientific research around the idea of the mind-body connection. We continue to learn more and more about how things like gut health, diet, and physical health are connected to our mental health. Dualism...