Thursday, November 15, 2007
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Networks and Neurology
When the DNA code was unraveled several decades ago, one of the seemingly remarkable features of it was its uniformity. Comprised of four simple letters, it could never the less contain the information essential for any life form.
Contrastingly, there has been some discussion over how unlikely it is that there would be a similarly simplistic code for the brain. There has so far been no indication that the brain has any uniform underlying rules.
I was reading an article dealing with the stability of the internet, and the idea it propounded was that the easiest, and truly only effective, way to manage any kind of network was by breaking it down to a single common denominator. In the case of the internet, any kind of data it passes is done via packets. These are by necessity uniform, regardless of whether they contain data for a streaming video on youtube, or an email or even this blog. Similarly, many other networks of all sorts (including non-technological) are handled with a uniform building block. Building organisms revolves around DNA, like I mentioned, but other systems have a similar structure too.
An example given in the article I read posited that the basic building blocks of the cell are also broken down in a simplistic matter. A bacterium may eat 100 different foods, and have 100 different proteins it produces, but it does not have a different pathway for turning each specific food group into each product. Instead, it converts all of its foods into one medium, and from there to its needed products.
Another example - economical matters too comprise a web. You may have a cow, and want some corn, but the person with corn for whatever reason may not want the cow. Hence direct bartering in this case does not work well. Again the solution is through an intermediary, namely cash. You can sell your cow for cash to someone else who wants it, and take that cash and get the corn you want from the person with excess.
To tie this all in with my topic - the human brain is vastly complicated, and still far beyond our fathom. Yet, from the perspective of it as a network, it seems essential that it too should have a single, unifying building block in how its neurons are arranged. To say that we do not know what it is is clear - but seeing as it appears necessary for any complicated grouping to have a unified basis, the eventual discovery of a neural code to me seems inescapable.
Contrastingly, there has been some discussion over how unlikely it is that there would be a similarly simplistic code for the brain. There has so far been no indication that the brain has any uniform underlying rules.
I was reading an article dealing with the stability of the internet, and the idea it propounded was that the easiest, and truly only effective, way to manage any kind of network was by breaking it down to a single common denominator. In the case of the internet, any kind of data it passes is done via packets. These are by necessity uniform, regardless of whether they contain data for a streaming video on youtube, or an email or even this blog. Similarly, many other networks of all sorts (including non-technological) are handled with a uniform building block. Building organisms revolves around DNA, like I mentioned, but other systems have a similar structure too.
An example given in the article I read posited that the basic building blocks of the cell are also broken down in a simplistic matter. A bacterium may eat 100 different foods, and have 100 different proteins it produces, but it does not have a different pathway for turning each specific food group into each product. Instead, it converts all of its foods into one medium, and from there to its needed products.
Another example - economical matters too comprise a web. You may have a cow, and want some corn, but the person with corn for whatever reason may not want the cow. Hence direct bartering in this case does not work well. Again the solution is through an intermediary, namely cash. You can sell your cow for cash to someone else who wants it, and take that cash and get the corn you want from the person with excess.
To tie this all in with my topic - the human brain is vastly complicated, and still far beyond our fathom. Yet, from the perspective of it as a network, it seems essential that it too should have a single, unifying building block in how its neurons are arranged. To say that we do not know what it is is clear - but seeing as it appears necessary for any complicated grouping to have a unified basis, the eventual discovery of a neural code to me seems inescapable.
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