Neuroscientists have used a classic branch of maths in a totally new way to peer into the structure of our brains. What they’ve discovered is that the brain is full of multi-dimensional geometrical structures operating in as many as 11 dimensions.
We’re used to thinking of the world from a 3-D perspective, so this may sound a bit tricky, but the results of this new study could be the next major step in understanding the fabric of the human brain – the most complex structure we know of.
This latest brain model was produced by a team of researchers from the Blue Brain Project, a Swiss research initiative devoted to building a supercomputer-powered reconstruction of the human brain.
The team used algebraic topology, a branch of mathematics used to describe the properties of objects and spaces regardless of how they change shape. They found that groups of neurons connect into ‘cliques’, and that the number of neurons in a clique would lead to its size as a high-dimensional geometric object.
“We found a world that we had never imagined,” says lead researcher, neuroscientist Henry Markram from the EPFL institute in Switzerland.
“There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to 11 dimensions.”
Human brains are estimated to have a staggering 86 billion neurons, with multiple connections from each cell webbing in every possible direction, forming the vast cellular network that somehow makes us capable of thought and consciousness.
With such a huge number of connections to work with, it’s no wonder we still don’t have a thorough understanding of how the brain’s neural network operates. But the new mathematical framework built by the team takes us one step closer to one day having a digital brain model.
To perform the mathematical tests, the team used a detailed model of the neocortex the Blue Brain Project team published back in 2015. The neocortex is thought to be the most recently evolved part of our brains, and the one involved in some of our higher-order functions like cognition and sensory perception.
After developing their mathematical framework and testing it on some virtual stimuli, the team also confirmed their results on real brain tissue in rats.
According to the researchers, algebraic topology provides mathematical tools for discerning details of the neural network both in a close-up view at the level of individual neurons, and a grander scale of the brain structure as a whole.
By connecting these two levels, the researchers could discern high-dimensional geometric structures in the brain, formed by collections of tightly connected neurons (cliques) and the empty spaces (cavities) between them.
“We found a remarkably high number and variety of high-dimensional directed cliques and cavities, which had not been seen before in neural networks, either biological or artificial,” the team writes in the study.
When at 6am you try to dress well enough for an interview later in the day (but not so they would be suspicious at work) and have exactly 10 minutes while two people are screaming at you to do it faster (one has to see geese as soon as possible and the other wants the former to stop and go back to sleep and is upset because you don’t do the fair share) and you did not prepare for it the night before because you had to work till midnight, and you are dressing two people at the same time, you usually end up pretty uncoordinated.
Thanks to Mark Heyer from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we now have a jazzy tune reflecting the Milky Way’s rotation in a nice tune.
The notes reflect the velocities of the gas rotating around the centre of our galaxy and were “composed” by a pentatonic minor scale that went through 20yrs of radio telescopic data on gas in our galaxy.
The gases filling the interstellar medium appear in the three phases of atomic, molecular and ionised; furthermore, they move either towards or away from Earth. Based on their spectra, they were “translated” into musical instruments of different sorts (molecular equalled woodblocks and piano, atomic ones were translated into acoustic bass, and saxophone was the translation of ionised gases).
I knew it was May 5th, I didn’t know it was a round anniversary.
I’d be curious to read more about Nesbitt’s book (if not the book itself), and see if there is cherrypicking going on, but still an interesting viewpoint – there are aspects of neomarxism that I’m very wary of, but like any idea, nothing can be taken absolutely, and nothing ever works out perfectly as predicted.
tinfoilparachute 