BRAIN BASIC FUNCTIONAL CIRCUIT. THE FUNCTIONAL UNIT OF THE BRAIN.ABSTRACT.pdf (64.0 KB)
This is the abstract of one writing I am trying to built about the functional unit of the brain which is a very hard topic, so I would like that somebody in the Community can give a glance and say something that helps me to persist in this work. I will be very grateful por any word that I get.
Hi @rehcraeser, thanks for sharing this post. Would you be able to elaborate a bit on this abstract? In particular, given the scope of this community, could you speak to how this work relates to Parkinson’s disease specifically and/or neurodegenerative diseases in general?
Hello Greg,
Thank you very much for you interesting message. I hope you are doing well. Since witnessing so many failures in addressing illnesses, while working as a professor in a hospital, I thought, “Something is missing here, or something is wrong.” So I began to think about pathology, and I discovered that there is a type of pathology that arises from quantitative changes in the function of organs such as glands, muscles, and others. If these changes are produced by innervation, that is, by the nervous system, then excitatory, inhibitory, and peripheral neurons must be positioned in relation to one another, forming a trio, such that when the excitatory neuron predominates, the organ’s function increases, and when the inhibitory neuron predominates, the organ’s function decreases. Thus, I believe I have identified the functional unit of the nervous system, and the alteration in the temporal balance of the release of the two classes of neurotransmitters is the initiation of the pathology. Since one form of Parkinson’s disease is characterized by muscle rigidity, I have thought that this is due to a predominance of the excitatory neuron, and the form that presents with tremor is due to a failure of that excitatory neuron.
Another point is that the known voltage of a neuron receiving innervation becomes less negative, from -65 mV to -55 mV when it is excited, and from -75 mV when it is inhibited. This behavior generates a binary code: one bit, ONE and ZERO. In other words, the nervous system is a mixed biological and electronic machine. With this functional unit, we are trying to generate different hardware components that correspond to the anatomy of the nervous system.
I leave it here and I would like to read your authorized comments.
I wish you the best time, kind regards.
Ramiro
(Attachment FUNCION GLANDULAR ALTERADA.bmp is missing)
Hi Ramiro, and thanks for sharing that abstract!
Similarly to Greg, I’m curious to understand how that can be more related to Parkinson’s - is it the case that you are focusing only on muscle rigidity? And how would you take insights and understand how that excitatory mechanism is specific to Parkinson’s and not to other diases?
Also, the -65 mV to -55 mV thresholds are very precise. Are you proposing intracellular recordings in human patients, or is this animal/model-based? How would you practically obtain that kind of neural voltage data at scale, given it seems to be quite invasive?
I look forward to your answers!
Hello Tiago, thank you very much for your interesting questions. I’ll try to answer them or at least to add some more information.
Our goal is to describe the brain’s basic functional circuit as a first step. The neuron’s voltage values were described by Hosgkin and Huxley from UK during last century and they are, rest voltage -65 mV, after excitation -55 mV and inhibition -75 mV and now we are thinking -55 mV is equivalent to ONE (1) and -75 mV is equivalent to CERO (0), so there we have a binary code, that is a BIT. From there we aspire to address the rest of the cortex, because that is the functional unit that is the elementary anatomical unit that serves to constitute the rest of the cortex.
We are here for now and I celebrate you are working on computer science because this task needs a multidisciplinary approach. I would like to add a little more, that is, the named neuron’s voltages are generated by two different chemical molecules: the excitatory glutamic acid and inhibitory GABA, which known information, maybe we can suggest something about these two molecules could be proposed as a therapeutic study.
I leave it here for the moment, but I will add some more information. I hope I have added a little more with this two paragraphs.
Please have a nice time, best
Ramiro
