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The Spike: How Your Brain Uses Electrical Impulses to Communicate - with Mark Humphries

Frames The Spike: How Your Brain Uses Electrical Impulses to Communicate - with Mark Humphries

Description The Spike: How Your Brain Uses Electrical Impulses to Communicate - with Mark Humphries

Comments The Spike: How Your Brain Uses Electrical Impulses to Communicate - with Mark Humphries

Speech: Needs Improvement Constant extended pauses Overly wordy Talks fast, but pauses and repetitiveness makes it feel S L O W Comment from : Chris W

87 billion neurons plus or minus 15, that do fast, long-range, and complex signalling, and 100 billion glial cells plus or minus 50, that do additional signalling which the brain relies upon and respond to signal conditions indicating reallocations of function, upgrades or downgrades in neurons (such as adding myelin coatings or allowing them to degrade) are needed Glial signalling and operations are exclusively short range and somewhat slower than neural signalling, but very mportant to overall function and plasticity Comment from : Zrebbesh

I saw a video about the neuralink device reading neural spikes in a pigs brain in real time How much will this technology impact our understanding of the brain? Comment from : OiOChaseOiO

I would disagree with the idea that the neurons are simply using electrical impulses to communicate That is misleading and not actually reflective of what is happening at the cellular level Cells are not electrical circuits, they are bio chemical units that can generate minute amounts of energy as electrical signals But most of the information passed between neurons and cells within those neurons are complex chemical compounds corresponding to some biochemical encoding of physical stimuli And that is the basis of residual memory in the brain not the small electrical discharge associated with these movements of chemical exchanges across cell boundaries As physical impulses come in and get converted to chemical signals these ripple through the cells and alter the connections between neurons This alters the pathways in the brains on a microscopic level so that common signals and patterns of signals form a 'connection' in the brain which is a form of learning brbrSo because of that, the brain does not actually see a pixel because the chemical activation in the brain corresponding to visual light hitting the retina is not a "pixel" It is a distinct chemical activation pattern that gets connected with other similar signals as a set of connected neural chemical compounds and connections between neurons This group of compounds and associated bio-electric signals represent the grouping of sets of neurons based on patterns of chemical activation So these low level microscopic chemical compounds traveling through the brain and forming pathways and connections are basically doing a form of segmentation of data Low level features like that edge you mentioned would correspond to a 'learned' set of connections between neurons corresponding to certain patterns of chemical compounds This process happens recursively all the way to the top level of learning about things in the real world which are represented as a network of connections between neurons based on biochemical compounds That process has no analogy in computer software or hardware because a pixel is nothing but a set of numbers with no inherent chemical properties to distinguish between colors of the light spectrum And that is why there is so much energy consumed in computer software to try and make sense of what pixels represent by running mathematical algorithms But that extra work is not required because of the way the brain dynamically and automatically generates, propagates and stores this chemical information at a cellular level Comment from : willd1mind mind

I find it fascinating that there is a group of neurons that are firing specifically when you try to envision neurons Like they are firing to think of themselves 🤪 Comment from : Jason Theobald

At the beginning of this very enlightening lecture we have 87 billion neurons; at the end Mark says 17 billion Does anybody know which is most accurate? Comment from : Earl Ledden

Probably just me; setting the playback speed at 75 allows me to catch every word Comment from : Earl Ledden

I am affraid, the experiments on spikes contaminated the way of speaking of this speakerhe speaks in a spiky wayvery fastslowvery fastslow, LOL Comment from : Achatina Slak

Can't we infer that spiking experiments with rats, monkeys, chimps, etc map reasonable well to humans? Why can't we do spiking readouts from active human brains? Is that a technical constraint or an ethical and legal constraint? Comment from : Truth starts here

thanks, i feel smarter now ^^ Comment from : flobo23

This 'spiked' my interest, there seems to be a deeper underlying meaning to this phrase Comment from : NS Sherlock

How my brain is feeling fascinated about brains Comment from : ll jiminn

Interesting piece Here's a laymanesque view The brain, the entire body really, is an avatar by which the life force, energy, manifests a physical form brbrAs such the you inside any one avatar isn't just that form You are so much more Yes a piece of you inhabits a physical form, but that which informs your totality, energy, can never die or be destroyed It merely transforms brbrThis is the basis of the First Law of Thermodynamics brbrSo enjoy yourself in your current form, follow all the muse you can But recognize that you never, truly, die You go on for as long as Time exists brbrMake of this what you will As for me I say hallelujah? brbrJohnbrAmerican Net'Zen Comment from : John Curtis

Unreal that a claim like, @00:49 "and it is these 87 billions neurons and their connections that underpin everything that you can do," is widely accepted It should be ardently dismissed as no where near the truth, and to act as if it is a self evident fact is absurd Comment from : SGWallner

Wow! Thanks for sharing the understanding, Mark Recalling and recreating a pattern of spikes, after a long time intrigues me now! Comment from : SKRIS

31:26 not clear how to differentiate if light was on from if got reward or not I thought the light indicated the reward??🤔 Comment from : Nishanth Salahudeen

It’s a shame that he didn’t use a good microphone for his talkbrThe royal institution should simply mail a good microphone to its speakers beforehand Comment from : slick heisenberg

you say neurons underpin everything But that's just an assumption Comment from : Chris

You will also need late Freud, so Winnicott and Lacan, and the epistemic break Comment from : Bill Thompson

Thanks 👍 Comment from : Bill Thompson

Drop culture as a stillness, work with Solms and Carroll, & Damasio, and me 😊 Comment from : Bill Thompson

So your trying to read and control rat brains Comment from : Michael Elbert

Similar question to previous questionWhen a single neuron spikes causes other spikes, if that original neuron spikes again does it cause spikes in the same neurons as before? Comment from : Gary LeLacheur

When a memory, of an image for example, is recalled do the same neurons spike, or does a somewhat different set of neurons spike? Comment from : Gary LeLacheur

There is must be a point to this presentation? Would you summarise your findings and the use of them? Comment from : Lumeone

My guess is our neurons are only responsible for weighting and directing sensory input, the more urgent/important, the more weight is given to the path the neurons take to enable a response I think the real magic lies in the microtubules in terms of memory storage and retrieval & that memory may even be stored in the grey matter The brain is indeed a very fascinating electro-chemical device Their is some suggestion at a quantum level that its the collapse of the wave function in the microtubules that gives rise to momentary consciousness Given enough millions of microtubules, each giving millisecond moments of conscious experience per second, would feel like a constant stream of persistent consciousness since you cant distinguish the time between millions of wave function collapses, the brain cant differentiate such at those short time scales Comment from : Megan J Perry

Our brains are mini matrix's in 1 giant 1 🙀 Comment from : Steven Egg

My guy greatest footballers you say and the three you chose aint even top three of their respective position for all time 😂🤌🏼 Comment from : Steven Toast

is the memory/spikes when the mice is getting the wrong direction/light stronger/weaker/the same/faster/slower fall off that when it gets it right?? Comment from : Dimitris Tsagdis

the brain isn't technically just in the head is it? it spreads into the body Comment from : D N

Why does he repeat himself so much? Comment from : 7Dnein

why do you sound like that? Like your under water ! Comment from : Kurtis Stevens

Clear concise and well illustrated presentation Deliberate effort to reach out to readers of popular science Thank you very much Comment from : Mmono Molebedi

👍 Comment from : KAĞAN NASUHBEYOĞLU

Thank you for that interesting talk, I especially liked the parts about the things we don't quite understand Comment from : Third Eye

Thanks I trained as a physicist but I love they way he explains now the old noggin works The neurons network reminds me of galaxy filaments brbrThis channel is my go to source for understanding! Comment from : mrwideboy

Clearly, the eyes should have been put on the back of the brain, and not the front Comment from : Simon WoodburyForget

Mark, you're saying i"billion billion"/i a lot Is that because, in your opinion, the viewers wouldn't be familiar with biquintillion?/i/b In any case, I don't think most people can conceptualize such a big number I can't either I can do calculations with it, but I can't conceptualize it Comment from : Niranjan Hanasoge

I've been watching The Royal Institution for many years now and it occurs to me how many of the lectures' work overlaps I would love to hear what Mr Humphries and Mark Solms, who gave a lecture here a couple months ago about the emotional root of human consciousness, would say about each others work Can anyone say if there has been any commentary similar to this? Comment from : ian welsh

Isn’t it possible that seemingly unnecessary neuronal activity is about indicating activity through the cells that are the supporting structure (attached to axons along their length) of the brain which I recall from an article years ago seems to be part of a secondary communication pathway that perhaps registers area activity or even consciousness? Comment from : William Bunting

I feel like I’m a few billion neurons short Comment from : InHellBaby1

Have you explored using carbon fiber as probes? Carbon fiber is 20 microns diameter but electrically is like an axon ie conductive core with a high resistance sheath but also chemically inert Comment from : William Bunting

Excellent stuff, ordered the book straight away Comment from : William Wilkinson

One brain Just add consciousness Comment from : j martin

I had no idea my brain communicated with Mark Humphries Comment from : Joe Medley

Almost everything in this presentation us wrong Mist if the cells in the brain are not neurons but glial cells that are actually respobsibke for most of netabolic abd electric activity in the brain, the dendrites are not generating inputs sigbal tranfre as the spike start soacially and temporally far off the dendrites, and start on neuron body There us no recognizable signsl processing in the brain as there are not tags to signals and it is impossible to backtrack a signal after it “jumps” from one neuron to another or mixed with signals from different regions of brain There is absolutely no idea how brain represents information, nobody ever has seen a bit of memory The directionnsensing neurons send spikes depending on the sensed line direction but the spike trains are just statistical correlates that require much longer time to detect than time the brain needs to complete a response to the visual stimulus There is a truckload of data on neurons and neuronal activity: but none makes sense… regardless what kind of fairy tale is being told in this presentation Comment from : Lajos Baranyi

Fantastic Comment from : NOSAkarate

Why is it that 87 billions neurons becomes 17 billions neurons ? Comment from : Gilles Turcotte

VERY VERY ANNOYED This is unacceptable that lately the RI has been posting lectures purely to promote a book by the presenterbrWhatever happened to 'Science for Sciences Sake' with the latest research by Scientists who haven't got a book out?brI've unsubscribed to your channel in disgust at the way it seems to be heading Comment from : Baz Snell

OMG some one explain we TALKIT IS OUR BRAIN TALKING wow amazing insightDid I Hear that right??? IM TALKING??? Wowsers 👌🤭 look ma my brains speaking Comment from : Paul Lee

I was here to see the electrical part of the neurvous system, since the hype is usually on the neurotransmitters and there is no insight by researching them Probably because this seems to be even farther from the essencebrbrThere must be some physical carriers of thoughts and perceptions, which combined I believe are consciousnessbrWhy we endlessly focus on following the signal: electrical, chemical, electro, chemo, E,C,E,C At best we will eventually end up outside of the nervous system in that way While all the indications point at CNS The only part of our bodies, which we do not understand brbrThis actually makes sense, since it must be the part producing us(proper), and unraveling its mystery basically would mean that we have exceeded our creator, have beaten the final boss, and have won the game of lifebrbrDoes anyone research what is changed in the receiving neuron itself, not whatever goes down its axon? Sounds like a logical place for searching, at least to mebrbrThe answer to MHumphies first mystery is obvious: Speed of LightbrNothing can be faster than photons(electromagnetic waves), not even thought Especially if the latter had worked only on chemistry Comment from : Петър Петров

Fansinating subject, I got about 6mins in However, from that point on, all I could hear/focus on was how many times he 'tut'-ed while talking 😲brWhy was he so disappointed at the beginning of each of his sentences?br-- Shame really, as I was looking forward to this 😥 Comment from : 3ATIVE VFX Studio

56:56 First thing to do is to let go of the existence of a 'mind' Comment from : D LJ

I would say we ARE our neurons and the rest of neurons in our body We ARE the impulses Comment from : pcuimac

Computed neural networks have copied this architecture Have you found anything discovered in CNN that have given insight to the wet chemical network in our heads?brbrIt strikes me that the spike is the analogue of a single number in the layer of a CNN and that, even in a simple CNN, that would not tell you much about either the CNN nor what the thing was processing Comment from : Bill Todd

"That's not the road - it is only a map" If he was being honest he would tell you nobody has any idea what ideas are or where they come from Scientists are no closer to understanding the nature of consciousness than they were when brain waves were first discovered Comment from : KodÄk

congratulations @the royal institute on 1 million subs, bet your reward centers are spiking all over! Comment from : Frogz

Fantastic lecture! Thanks Mark Humphries & RI! Comment from : Stan Libuda

My brain is using electrical impulses to communicate with Mark Humphries? I hope he's ok with that Comment from : IndustrialBonecraft

neurotic" at best, old news at any stage, wont bother with the book, i no how to make bread its very simple like this video, the knoledge is ancient Comment from : GOBSTOPPA

For the dark neuron problem, I would guess that it's an information thing Not firing is still information and is less costly than firing Further, the distribution 10 providing 75 of spikes might be similar to zipf's law - where for example in our language the letter e is very common and the letter x is not therefore the information conveyed by an infrequent firing neuron is higher than a frequently firing one but the combination provides context Comment from : Joe Short

I never realized they're like little capacitors Comment from : Jesse

It's through the ENDOCANNABINOID SYSTEM that talking is done I have a 55 brain injury that THC is reconnecting it healing my brain injury The FEDERAL agent at router CenturyLink4347 in KALISPELL MONTANA is CYBER ATTACKING me because of this killing computers Comment from : Ed` Bland

Bravo! Comment from : TheRobotsDeletedMyComment

The first few minutes were pretty heavy on neurons talk to each other 😅 Comment from : Wet Doggo

At fisrt I read "How Your Brain Uses Electrical Impulses to Communicate with Mark Humphries" Comment from : Itiel López

Cool Comment from : 『 𝙵 』『 𝙻 』『 𝚄 』『 𝚇 』

I am thinking about how virus might have bin important to the early stages of life on Earth Comment from : Jonathan Jollimore

1st Comment from : Digonter Khoje

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