No, we do not use only 10% of our brain. That is a baseless myth. However, we may underestimate the activity of our thinking organ. At least, that is what an investigation carried out by scientists from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) maintains, although it must be specified that they have carried out their experiments with rats.
These researchers have discovered that dendrites , the branching processes of nerve cells through which they receive and transmit external stimuli, are much more than a transmitter channel that carries information from one neuron to another. And since dendrites make up 90% of neural tissue, this finding would imply that brain activity could be 10 times higher than is believed (which is not the same as being 10 times smarter).
To understand it better, you have to know how a brain processes and stores information.
This is how gray matter works
Neurons are the nerve cells of the brain. Its body is called a soma and from it arise branches that scientists call dendrites. Soma generates brief nerve impulses to communicate with other neurons. Neuroscientists have always thought that these impulses activate dendrites, which simply send currents from soma to soma. This would be the process that would allow the formation and storage of memories, learning …
But new work from UCLA has found that dendrites play a role that goes beyond being a passive conduit of electrical signals. According to Mayank Mehta, director of the research, “dendrites are much more active than soma, and knowing this will change our understanding of the way the brain processes information. This could lead to new treatments for neurological disorders and to the design of computers that think like humans. “
What Mehta and her colleagues have discovered is that rat dendrites also generate their own impulses. And in an amount ten times greater than the somas. In addition, they have verified that these impulses have different voltages, unlike those of somas, which occur or not, without half measures. In computer language, we could say that somas work like binary code (ones and zeros) and do digital computation, while dendrites do analog computation, with fluctuations.
Taking into account this activity of the dendrites, and that they have a volume almost one hundred times greater than that of the neural centers, Mehta estimates that the brain has a computational capacity one hundred times greater than that estimated.
From rats to humans
If scientists verify that this process is identical in the human brain – and they are convinced that it is – we could find ourselves facing a paradigm shift in the understanding of this organ. According to Jason Moore, a UCLA researcher and one of the authors of the work, “it is often assumed that learning occurs when the bodies of two neurons are active at the same time, but our research suggests that this could happen when both soma and neurons are active. dendrites, and that different parts of these could be activated at different times, which would imply that learning is a much more flexible process than we thought. “
This would mean a radical transformation in what we knew about the functioning of the brain that could lead to new treatments for brain disorders that are now incurable, and the creation of artificial intelligences very similar to human beings.
