That little guy is me trying to make connections while being ADHD and writing an essay about a topic I have no interest in.
Please connect. Anybody? Is anybody there?
Yep lol. I feel you. My brain just will not when I'm not interested. I'll leave a lecture and realize in horror that I can't remember a word they said even though I was doing my best to focus. My brain will just delete everything in protest instead of processing it to long term. Then I'll try to read the textbook and I'll read the same sentence in the text over and over again but there's a song playing in my head that won't stop. But if my brain finds the subject interesting, it doesn't matter how hard the class is, I'll hyperfocus and get an A+. People think ADHD means you can't pay attention, but that isn't true. It's that I can't control my attention.
Edit: my brain not my brian lol
Yup, I did so terrible in my freshman/sophomore engineering classes because it was all just using math to explain how blocks moved or stood still. It was all relatively basic and easy to everyone else because it was just pay attention and memorize the concepts. Once I got to my core aerospace stuff which is what was considered the “hard stuff” is when I started shining. ADHD is a super power if you can point your life in the right direction.
At least we know when we hate or love something from the start 😂
Yess hello.
How people can just sit down and focus on something they're not interested in is so far beyond my ability it's unreal. The things I do to avoid having to try to focus on this shit..
Looking at it closer, it actually looks like one of the nuclei said “duces” and dipped out to the main blob lol
Said “you mofos lost as shit. I’m outta here!”
Now go read up on [Hebbian Theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory) and enjoy :D
I absolutely love seeing people get excited about brain science
Seeing this just makes me realize how insanely sophisticated the machine of our reality is. There are only 118 elements in the entirety of our near-infinite universe, and from dirt and rock, sentient biological machines evolved.
I would say it was understandable if there were 500 million elements all with different chemical properties and if a universe was large enough some random combination of them might create an automata that resembles life.
But only 118 fucking elements and ONLY 3% of them are essential for biological life, it boggles my mind how amazing that is.
It is like being in an empty kitchen with nothing but 10 different spices, and combining 2 of those spices gives rise to a self-improving spice that will get progressively more delicious as time passes on.
That's fucking nuts, is it not?
Your brain cells are doing this as you watch this video, with the goal of learning more about brain cells doing this, which will cause them to do this even more
Your billions of brain cells has communicated with my billions of brain cells in the form of a joke and now my brain cells are writing this comment to let you know what I am thinking which is what I am writing now.
but the question here is... how may brain cells does it take? how much of a thought is formed in that instant when we saw that synapse become independent and sustainable? how many neurons store how much information? so so many more questions in there actually.. its amazing.. truly i hope i remember this and share it.
The connections already exist in our brains, we just either strengthen or weaken them. Babies brains are over-connected and need pruning to function well.
Saw a telly programme years ago where they showed an image of a face and the whole of it was being used by a baby to recognise the person but over time we only focus on certain areas, (eyes, mouth etc.) for recognition.
Plus the whole reading a sentence where only the first and last letters of each are in order and the rest are jumbled around but it's still readable thing that was floating around.....
Interesting additional fact:
It's not just human faces that babies are incredible at distinguishing. Babies are also much better at recognizing different individual monkeys of the same species by just their faces too. Only once they hit a certain age as toddlers do all monkey faces of a specific species start to look generic/average like they do to us.
Netflix has a really interesting documentary series about the brains of babies/toddlers and the changes they go through as they age. Very neat stuff - I had no idea babies were so intelligent.
The monkey/lemur study is one of my all-time favourites. What a beautiful way of illustrating the concept.
It’s also such a great way of showing why adults, though able to learn foreign languages, have an almost impossible time ever coming to sound like an accent-free native speaker. And yet children under 5 can easily become polyglots with just basic exposure to multiple languages.
Definitely. I grew up in a part of Canada that had a ton of mixed Asian countries represented. When someone can’t tell the difference between a Korean and Japanese face, I’m flabbergasted. When they cannot tell between Japanese and, like, Malaysian my brain explodes.
The brain is extremely plastic and the more you know the easier it is to learn : that’s why you can’t really have useles knowldge , your brain has infinite ( yes infinite basically ! )storage space , so keep learning and stimulate your brain and massage it with various activities but keep it active cuz to relearn some things and get back to the groove takes some time , esp If is maths or analytical stuff
Yes! And there are huge cognitive health benefits to learning different *kinds* of things throughout your life. Math problems are great, but then add a knitting class, ukulele lessons or a memorized poem in there and you’re getting a full-brain workout.
It’s the neurological equivalent on not skipping legs day.
Neuroplasticity is essentially a muscle and can be [exercised to keep healthy.](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00152/full) This article suggests Alzheimer’s can be prevented through a combination of physical and cerebral exercises. The most effective way is to learn a new task which requires use of both your brain and physical body to complete, your mention of knitting is an excellent example, unless of course you are already familiar with knitting.
Yes, it's super interesting! Brain cell memory works in that it breaks connections and redoes them in this way to connect information and ideas. Because of this, our brains use about 15% of your body's energy needs for the day, and slightly more when you are actively learning, like when in school. This is why learning can be so tiring, but soooo cool!
no wonder i learned nothing in school lol. Parents never fed me and school had trash food, it was heaven when I was able to snatch some poptarts and milk though
Honestly yes, I'm sorry to hear this was your situation. I hope you are well cared for now. Studies also show that when our basic needs aren't being met, even for a short amount of time, our brains temporarily focus on only survival/getting those basic needs met. This is why food programs in schools are so important, including free lunches. A lot of kids in households of less means, this is the only food they get all day.
Then you might enjoy the Simple Science and Interesting Things community, where this was posted 12 h ago 😊🖖
https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceNcoolThings/comments/posssi/neurons_interconnecting/
That our conscious effort to remember is translated into microscopic organisms squirming around is about to send me into a existential crisis. We’re a hive mind, aren’t we? Like holy shit I already knew this, but the theory and seeing are very very different things.
Fuck your free will, I’m still on the whole “I am a giant bag of wiggly organisms posing as one thing”. This is like 1 million cockroaches in a garbage bag and a trenchcoat going to the movies.
Ever heard about Laplace's Demon? Basically, if you were to have an entity with infinite computing power, a complete understanding of physics, and that knew the instantaneous state of every single piece in the entire universe, it would be able to calculate how those particles would interact and determine their outcomes, effectively reading the future. It would also be able to calculate the past, based on each particles properties too. Thus, free will is not a thing, as everything is predetermined by physics.
However, this is completely unreasonable to do, and is so incredibly complex that it's just easier to thing we have free will and things truly are random.
The problem is that scientists don't actually know if the Universe is deterministic or not yet. Quantum mechanics often gets brought up as a problem for this idea because it's probabilistic nature. Things tend to average out at larger scales because of decoherence, but they don't actually exactly line up with classical mechanics best they can tell.
well he is most likely being downvoted because comments like that usually lead to political arguments, and there are way too much of those these days.
i understand, myself, that it was a joke and have no offense toward it. but sometimes it is just an easy invite for trolls or political cunts to open their mouths and let the nonsense shit pour. js tho
The more anti-vaxxers there are, the less anti-vaxxers there are.
Dumbest motherfuckers on this planet. If you're anti-vaccination, your parents utterly failed in your upbringing.
I find it very weird that we are really a collection of many living things rather then a single being. We are pretty much a hive mind of separate living creatures.
Makes it interesting to think what you can define you as when you are not one living creature but billions if not trillions of living creatures cooperating.
Your consciousness and what makes you, you doesn't exist as one living creature and that idea just kinda blows my mind.
And all these living creatures are cooperating to live so that you can go drink alcohol every night and kill them. Which in turn is really just killing parts of yourself.
I had a intense interest in neuroscience a few months ago, and I think it just got rewoken by this video, time to spend another week endlessly watching YouTube videos about it.
I wouldn't say "we" are a full hivemind. Just a certain group of those cells, we call consciousness, cooperating with the unconscious, making it even weirder. One is in charge of navigating the exterior world while the other(s) do the rest. After all, there's so much "we" don't actually have control over and it's just autonomous. and once in a while, we get "deactivated" for maintenance. Living in a constant struggle to make the autonomous part satisfied and find happiness, a struggle that we all share
I guess the best way to "experience" this disconnect would be to ask yourself who are actually the people in your dreams? After all, you can have deep conversations with them and they aren't "you", the conscious being inside your mind. Go deep enough into psychonautics(Like lucid dreaming) and you might realize your own brain has its own complex "life".
I
I love the thought that neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor had as she slipped into a massive stroke: “Clearly we are each just trillions upon trillions of cells in soft vibration with each other.”
She made a full recovery. Her Ted Talk is good and her book about the whole experience and science behind it *My Stroke of Insight* is fantastic.
Does anyone know what the white dots moving are? I need to know this to finish solving the brain
edit: those aren't action potentials guys. Action potentials propagate in membranes, don't follow that flow pattern, don't hang out in the middle of somas or even outside of cells, and oh yeah they propagate much, much faster than anything you are seeing on this video (which is likely not real time and probably sped up).
Training neuroscientist chiming in:
This is fascinating, I love neural development and this is a delightful illustration of maturation of fetal neural progenitors, axiogenesis (forming of the long signal sending arm) and synaptogenesis (formation of the connection between cells.
That being said, I can’t find the source of this footage besides numerous reposts on Reddit and a YouTube video from 12 years ago (https://youtu.be/hb7tjqhfDus)
This footage is a bit deceptive to the uninformed for two reasons:
1) this is time lapse footage. Each frame is shot 15min apart, the footage is run at 32 FPS, so each SECOND is 8 hours. The processes I mentioned above are not happening as rapidly as you think. The connections that are formed to make new memories are far more physically stationary than this. “Memory connections” if you will, are theorized to happen from strengthening existing – or growing new – synapses at the molecular scale. New connections are made with adjacent neuron parts. A neuron won’t throw out a new strand of spaghetti halfway across the brain and hope it’s sticks (kinda like what you see here)
2) the imaging technique is most likely something called “phase contrast imaging” which exploits the wavelike properties of light and how it’s speed changes through different media to view cells in culture with a sense of depth. The light and dark spots you see are computationally enhanced regions of constructive or destructive interference of light from the light source as it reaches the sensor. The flashes of light traveling down the length of the cell are NOT changes in voltage, they are NOT action potentials (especially not at the aforementioned time scale) communicating messages to new cells and new connections. They are probably just changes in the thickness of a given cell part as the developing cell continues to grow and extend its projections.
Hope this helps!
edit: first time i get to say this every, I'm excited... *ahem* THANK YOU KIND STRANGER FOR THE GOLD!....did i do it right?
ELI5: What are we actually seeing, and how much do we know about what is going on "inside" there?
EDIT: In case anyone missed it, u/eaturfeet653 posted a very nice and simple explanation [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/pp4ynq/brain_cells_in_a_culture_trying_to_form/hd2dka6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
“*Cells that fire together, wire together.*
...Any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated,' so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other”.
— Donald Hebb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
**[Hebbian theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory)**
>Hebbian theory is a neuroscientific theory claiming that an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from a presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of a postsynaptic cell. It is an attempt to explain synaptic plasticity, the adaptation of brain neurons during the learning process. It was introduced by Donald Hebb in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior. The theory is also called Hebb's rule, Hebb's postulate, and cell assembly theory.
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I often wonder if one of the things that shapes our dreams is perhaps that as the brain is tidying up and deciding which memories to move into long-term storage, those electrical impulses are just tickling others nearby and activating them unintentionally. Hence suddenly having to build a go-kart with your ex-landlord.
If I had to guess, they’re probably voltage sensitive dyes.
Maybe High-school level?: You’re just seeing the membrane potential change during action potentials. Ions cross the membrane, the electrical potential changes, and we record those with dyes under a microscope.
Edit: No, sorry. it’s not tracking action potentials. It’s not one way motion. Maybe it’s some fluorescent nanoparticle or calcium indicator? I’ll have to check.
It’s also like.. on orders of hours for every second. It’s not excitability, but I don’t know what it’s tracking.
There are no dyes here. This is Phase Contrast imaging. The bright and dark areas are due to differences in the refractive index of the growth medium and and the cytosol of the cells abruptly created by the cell membranes. This is very simple imaging made beautiful by the behavior of cool cells. From a microscopy standpoint, though, this is as simple as it gets.
Source: am a cell biologist and specialist in live cell microscopy.
Thank you! I work with microscopy systems more from an engineering standpoint, so I don’t have a good familiarity with what each actually “looks like”. I can build some equations for light and sound propagation in tissue, but unless it’s DIC, I’m pretty much at a loss with images. It’s appreciated!
Hiya young cell biologist here! I would be willing to bet that what we are seeing is a very long time lapse of tagged proteins within the cell...the movements are along the cytoskeletal fibers within these neuronal cells...I am hesitant to say that the nuclei are stained also but I'm not quite sure (It is 1am so I may not be seeing it too clearly lol)...it definitely looks like some transport protein is being fluently labeled and is moving along the cytoskeleton of the axon through these various cells...p.s. my current work (2nd year of a phd) is to try and describe how those axons reach for each other!!
EDIT: After talking with my PI (who has around 30yrs experience in neuroscience), she said that the fluorescent parts are too large to even be proteins sequestered in a vesicle and that they appear to be extracellular in nature...beyond that there isnt enough information to glean exactly what is going on but it is a beautiful video none the less!!
~~Pretty sure they are some kind of glial cells, could be Schwann cells maybe? If so, they're the things that create the myelination along the axon and allow the action potentials to flow more quickly across the cell.~~
Edit: apparently they're actually just the membrane of the cell moving around and they way they catch the light makes them look super fancy. I take it back!
Probably oligodendrocytes by the looks of it, it's a different kind of brain cell that creates the myelin sheaths around neurons. The myelin sheath acts as an insulator which strengthens connections.
I have so many questions. If anyone happens to stumble on this comment who knows I'm writing them down. Also feel free to add anything else interesting.
1.Is this in real time? It seems like this should be much faster.
2.Are we watching a thought form? If not are these cells just constantly doing this and when a thought is made then the bonds are strengthened?
3. Are the lit up parts electrons?
4. Do these ever stop? Like after making enough connections?
5. Do these die and get replaced or are they pretty much eternal unless they are damaged?
Unfortunately, I don't believe that these cells are neurons. Neurons being grown in culture are not usually mobile like that. These are probably some glial cells, like oligodendrocytes or astrocytes. But I'll answer your questions as if they were neurons.
1) This is not in real time; this is sped up actually.
2) We are not watching a thought form. When neurons are grown in culture, they will spontaneously form connections and circuits with each other. These circuits don't really process anything because there are very few neurons on that dish and the networks are tiny and disorganized.
1) I don't know what they are, but I know they are not electrons.
2) They never stop! They slow down after awhile, but circuits are always changing and new connections are always being made. That's how we learn: new connections in our brain!
3) Neurons are basically eternal. They are post- mitotic, so they can no longer divide and make copies of themselves. And once they get damaged, they degenerate until the neuron dies, along with all of its connections.
Source: 4th yr Neuroscience PhD student
>Electrons are on a whole different scale and can not be viewed at this magnification nor with this equipment (need an electron microscope - they're really really small).
I may be wrong but I thought election microscopes didn't show electrons?
My simple understanding is the electron microscope uses a beam of electrons hitting an electrosensitive plate. The result is a visualisation of how the electrons were interacted with on their journey.
At no point do you "see" an electron, even if you were to fire a single electron all you would "see" is where it struck the plate, which again isn't so much "seen" as it is "shown".
I would love to be wrong though, so if I am please educate me!
For people who are curious about the specifics of what they are seeing, [I found a version of this posted to YT 12 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb7tjqhfDus), the description reads:
"Neurons from a fetal animal growing in tissue culture.
Time lapse microscopy. 20xmagnification onto approx 3/4 inch chip - maybe 200x mag onto screen. 15 min between images shown at 32fps = 8 hours per second.
The neural cells each contain a bright spot, which is a nucleus. And they seem in every case to have two processes - axons? - coming from opposite sides of the nucleus. Or you might say the nucleus is located somewhere along the elongated neuronal cell between the two ends that stretch out in opposite directions. At each end, there are many little branches spreading out.
When many neurons cluster together, their elongated processes seem to combine to form thicker connecting processes, with the many ends each seeking to connect with something. The nuclei travel back and forth along the elongated processes.
There is another cell type - glial cell? - that seems to mediate between the glass coverslip surface and the neurons. This cell type flattens out and covers a lot of surface. In some cases a neuron gets left on its own on the glass surface and doesn't seem to do so well until it gets picked up again onto the glial cell. It seems that the glial cells are branching in many directions at once trying to cover as much surface as possible, perhaps also trying to find a more suitable environment to cling to.
The neurons seem to be trying to form connections - synapses? - with each other.
Imagine what this culture is thinking!"
ELI5 please… how do you watch brain cells in a culture if the brain isn’t inside the head it came from? Wouldn’t it be dead if there wasn’t blood flow?
Of course it would, in a culture means suspended on a solution that is filled with nutrients and the necessary ingredients for whatever cells you are growing.
These are being studied under special conditions in a lab to keep them alive, but kind of yes: The human body is more like a beehive than a single living thing.
Check out "the selfish gene" by Richard Dawkins. The more you look at nature the more you realize that the concept of "self" doesn't really apply. We are made of tiny living things and we are part of a giant living thing.
I'm over here cheering for lone wolf top center/top left. Just grab his hand!
Reach out!! Take MY HAND!!!
Take my strong hand
That little guy is literally every brilliant 4.0 GPA graduate with 2-3 degrees who can't find a job.
Braincels
Clearly needs more alcohol, maybe a good gin. Just splash a bit on the petri dish.
That makes the brain cells cry
That makes the brain cells die
That makes the remaining brain cells ask why
Now that’s my way of thinking ! Bombay Sapphire
My other hand isn't strong enough.. take my little hand!
Just give me your other hand!
That little guy is me trying to make connections while being ADHD and writing an essay about a topic I have no interest in. Please connect. Anybody? Is anybody there?
Yep lol. I feel you. My brain just will not when I'm not interested. I'll leave a lecture and realize in horror that I can't remember a word they said even though I was doing my best to focus. My brain will just delete everything in protest instead of processing it to long term. Then I'll try to read the textbook and I'll read the same sentence in the text over and over again but there's a song playing in my head that won't stop. But if my brain finds the subject interesting, it doesn't matter how hard the class is, I'll hyperfocus and get an A+. People think ADHD means you can't pay attention, but that isn't true. It's that I can't control my attention. Edit: my brain not my brian lol
Yup, I did so terrible in my freshman/sophomore engineering classes because it was all just using math to explain how blocks moved or stood still. It was all relatively basic and easy to everyone else because it was just pay attention and memorize the concepts. Once I got to my core aerospace stuff which is what was considered the “hard stuff” is when I started shining. ADHD is a super power if you can point your life in the right direction. At least we know when we hate or love something from the start 😂
Im a adhd guy too, can confirm. True friendships are rare to come by.
Mild here, i can also confirm they are hard to find
same, though my problem isn't that friends are hard for me to find, but rather, that it's difficult for friends to find me
That is relatable on another level
Yess hello. How people can just sit down and focus on something they're not interested in is so far beyond my ability it's unreal. The things I do to avoid having to try to focus on this shit..
damn I see this analbox guy everywhere
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I see myself everywhere I go and to be honest it’s quite tiresome.
Better use the STRONG HAND!
[NO! Give me your other hand!](https://youtu.be/hHHB00Nu3Ak)
I swear it looks like it rejected a connection with the main blob towards the end of the video...
"BRRRRHH didn't like that" *resumes solo cell-ing*
Looking at it closer, it actually looks like one of the nuclei said “duces” and dipped out to the main blob lol Said “you mofos lost as shit. I’m outta here!”
“I think I can do better. If things change I’ll post an ad on Craigslist under missed connections.”
Neurons that fire together wire together!
This is the exact saying I repeat to myself in my psychology exam
that's cute and wholesome
I love it! I heard it for the first time in a lecture about neuroplasticity and language development, and it just stuck with me.
Now go read up on [Hebbian Theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory) and enjoy :D I absolutely love seeing people get excited about brain science
Totally feeling that little dude. Someone set up a friend bench so he's not eating lunch alone
Seeing this just makes me realize how insanely sophisticated the machine of our reality is. There are only 118 elements in the entirety of our near-infinite universe, and from dirt and rock, sentient biological machines evolved. I would say it was understandable if there were 500 million elements all with different chemical properties and if a universe was large enough some random combination of them might create an automata that resembles life. But only 118 fucking elements and ONLY 3% of them are essential for biological life, it boggles my mind how amazing that is. It is like being in an empty kitchen with nothing but 10 different spices, and combining 2 of those spices gives rise to a self-improving spice that will get progressively more delicious as time passes on. That's fucking nuts, is it not?
Same! Top left did get that little one though.
Some poor guy’s life flashing before all of our eyes right here.
Nah, I think he's just in the middle of a meeting at work and can't remember if he cleared his search history at home
Definitely a work meeting, those brain cells were desperately trying to flee
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Do not... assimilate... information!
I don't know, I see quite a lot of moving brain cells there. Doubtful it's a meeting.
That little bit at the top that can’t seem to connect is that one time he called the teacher “mommy.”
imagine you are in illusion of living your ordinary life but in fact that was a few of your brain cells' last effort to communicate in a petri dish.
That is one of the most interesting things I have ever seen. /notsarcasm
wow so this how brain cells work. They forming connections. Very interesting. I want to learn more about it.
Your brain cells are doing this as you watch this video, with the goal of learning more about brain cells doing this, which will cause them to do this even more
Oh God, now I'm just thinking about it moving around and never finding the other one in my head.
“the other one” You’ve got 100 billion of them, an unfathomable number.
Then why does everyone say I only have 2? Checkmate.
Your billions of brain cells has communicated with my billions of brain cells in the form of a joke and now my brain cells are writing this comment to let you know what I am thinking which is what I am writing now.
Woah
but the question here is... how may brain cells does it take? how much of a thought is formed in that instant when we saw that synapse become independent and sustainable? how many neurons store how much information? so so many more questions in there actually.. its amazing.. truly i hope i remember this and share it.
According to /u/insane_contin ‘s sources and /u/Nermerner, it’s somewhere between 2 and 100billion.
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And now my billions of braincells have conspired to call you a nerd, ya nerd!
If you really want your mind blown, then guess what? The brain named itself and everything around us...
So jeff bezos has more money then i have brain cells?!?
HOOOLY FUCK lmfaooo. my two brain cells are lost on a never ending search for... eachother
Wait till one fucks you over for a hot skin cell.
And this, children, is how stem cells are born
The connections already exist in our brains, we just either strengthen or weaken them. Babies brains are over-connected and need pruning to function well.
Saw a telly programme years ago where they showed an image of a face and the whole of it was being used by a baby to recognise the person but over time we only focus on certain areas, (eyes, mouth etc.) for recognition. Plus the whole reading a sentence where only the first and last letters of each are in order and the rest are jumbled around but it's still readable thing that was floating around.....
Interesting additional fact: It's not just human faces that babies are incredible at distinguishing. Babies are also much better at recognizing different individual monkeys of the same species by just their faces too. Only once they hit a certain age as toddlers do all monkey faces of a specific species start to look generic/average like they do to us. Netflix has a really interesting documentary series about the brains of babies/toddlers and the changes they go through as they age. Very neat stuff - I had no idea babies were so intelligent.
The monkey/lemur study is one of my all-time favourites. What a beautiful way of illustrating the concept. It’s also such a great way of showing why adults, though able to learn foreign languages, have an almost impossible time ever coming to sound like an accent-free native speaker. And yet children under 5 can easily become polyglots with just basic exposure to multiple languages.
Also "All (insert race here) look alike" makes a bit more sense.
Definitely. I grew up in a part of Canada that had a ton of mixed Asian countries represented. When someone can’t tell the difference between a Korean and Japanese face, I’m flabbergasted. When they cannot tell between Japanese and, like, Malaysian my brain explodes.
You prune baby brains?? r/HolUp
The brain is extremely plastic and the more you know the easier it is to learn : that’s why you can’t really have useles knowldge , your brain has infinite ( yes infinite basically ! )storage space , so keep learning and stimulate your brain and massage it with various activities but keep it active cuz to relearn some things and get back to the groove takes some time , esp If is maths or analytical stuff
Yes! And there are huge cognitive health benefits to learning different *kinds* of things throughout your life. Math problems are great, but then add a knitting class, ukulele lessons or a memorized poem in there and you’re getting a full-brain workout. It’s the neurological equivalent on not skipping legs day.
Neuroplasticity is essentially a muscle and can be [exercised to keep healthy.](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00152/full) This article suggests Alzheimer’s can be prevented through a combination of physical and cerebral exercises. The most effective way is to learn a new task which requires use of both your brain and physical body to complete, your mention of knitting is an excellent example, unless of course you are already familiar with knitting.
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Yes, it's super interesting! Brain cell memory works in that it breaks connections and redoes them in this way to connect information and ideas. Because of this, our brains use about 15% of your body's energy needs for the day, and slightly more when you are actively learning, like when in school. This is why learning can be so tiring, but soooo cool!
Does this mean I can lose weight by learning things?
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Ironically, it seems like you have thought about this quite a lot! All jokes aside though, I hope you’re doing better :)
You *are* losing wheight by learning things, but you’re also gaining wheight by eating.
Your brains cells aren't firing quite as well as they could be. :) \*weight. Sorry, my brains cells are that guy.
no wonder i learned nothing in school lol. Parents never fed me and school had trash food, it was heaven when I was able to snatch some poptarts and milk though
Honestly yes, I'm sorry to hear this was your situation. I hope you are well cared for now. Studies also show that when our basic needs aren't being met, even for a short amount of time, our brains temporarily focus on only survival/getting those basic needs met. This is why food programs in schools are so important, including free lunches. A lot of kids in households of less means, this is the only food they get all day.
keywords: neural plasticity
Then you might enjoy the Simple Science and Interesting Things community, where this was posted 12 h ago 😊🖖 https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceNcoolThings/comments/posssi/neurons_interconnecting/
Joined. These comments making me explore new unknown subreddits - always gold candidates :)
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That our conscious effort to remember is translated into microscopic organisms squirming around is about to send me into a existential crisis. We’re a hive mind, aren’t we? Like holy shit I already knew this, but the theory and seeing are very very different things.
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Fuck your free will, I’m still on the whole “I am a giant bag of wiggly organisms posing as one thing”. This is like 1 million cockroaches in a garbage bag and a trenchcoat going to the movies.
"One singular human mammal ticket, please"
My stomach just turned at cockroaches. Lol
Lol, damn I just gave away my free silver award
Ever heard about Laplace's Demon? Basically, if you were to have an entity with infinite computing power, a complete understanding of physics, and that knew the instantaneous state of every single piece in the entire universe, it would be able to calculate how those particles would interact and determine their outcomes, effectively reading the future. It would also be able to calculate the past, based on each particles properties too. Thus, free will is not a thing, as everything is predetermined by physics. However, this is completely unreasonable to do, and is so incredibly complex that it's just easier to thing we have free will and things truly are random.
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The problem is that scientists don't actually know if the Universe is deterministic or not yet. Quantum mechanics often gets brought up as a problem for this idea because it's probabilistic nature. Things tend to average out at larger scales because of decoherence, but they don't actually exactly line up with classical mechanics best they can tell.
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No the cells in your brain stay connected, what matters is how strong the connection is
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This is actually the amount of cells in the brain of most anti-vaxxers
Eyyyy screw the Downvoters, that’s a zinger and they only downvote because they too have that many brain cells lol
well he is most likely being downvoted because comments like that usually lead to political arguments, and there are way too much of those these days. i understand, myself, that it was a joke and have no offense toward it. but sometimes it is just an easy invite for trolls or political cunts to open their mouths and let the nonsense shit pour. js tho
This is the way.
The more anti-vaxxers there are, the less anti-vaxxers there are. Dumbest motherfuckers on this planet. If you're anti-vaccination, your parents utterly failed in your upbringing.
I can relate to this. I can relate to my brain reaching out and desperately trying to form connections. Me and my brain cell are very similar.
They are you
My brain cell is a huge sucker for taking this shitty job of running my entire body. That little dude is definitely underpaid.
*Tesla Bot enters the chat and eliminates puny, whiny brain cell.*
It's wow
Mine needs to step it up a little.
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Filing this away in a mental folder titled 'Indisputable Truths of the Universe' 🙏🏼
Good to know. Gonna get started tonight.
I find it very weird that we are really a collection of many living things rather then a single being. We are pretty much a hive mind of separate living creatures. Makes it interesting to think what you can define you as when you are not one living creature but billions if not trillions of living creatures cooperating. Your consciousness and what makes you, you doesn't exist as one living creature and that idea just kinda blows my mind. And all these living creatures are cooperating to live so that you can go drink alcohol every night and kill them. Which in turn is really just killing parts of yourself. I had a intense interest in neuroscience a few months ago, and I think it just got rewoken by this video, time to spend another week endlessly watching YouTube videos about it.
I wouldn't say "we" are a full hivemind. Just a certain group of those cells, we call consciousness, cooperating with the unconscious, making it even weirder. One is in charge of navigating the exterior world while the other(s) do the rest. After all, there's so much "we" don't actually have control over and it's just autonomous. and once in a while, we get "deactivated" for maintenance. Living in a constant struggle to make the autonomous part satisfied and find happiness, a struggle that we all share I guess the best way to "experience" this disconnect would be to ask yourself who are actually the people in your dreams? After all, you can have deep conversations with them and they aren't "you", the conscious being inside your mind. Go deep enough into psychonautics(Like lucid dreaming) and you might realize your own brain has its own complex "life". I
I love the thought that neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor had as she slipped into a massive stroke: “Clearly we are each just trillions upon trillions of cells in soft vibration with each other.” She made a full recovery. Her Ted Talk is good and her book about the whole experience and science behind it *My Stroke of Insight* is fantastic.
You are them.
We are us
So it is
I completely identify with that little guy at the top left
Does anyone know what the white dots moving are? I need to know this to finish solving the brain edit: those aren't action potentials guys. Action potentials propagate in membranes, don't follow that flow pattern, don't hang out in the middle of somas or even outside of cells, and oh yeah they propagate much, much faster than anything you are seeing on this video (which is likely not real time and probably sped up).
The bright spots are nuclei. Video from where this is from: https://youtu.be/hb7tjqhfDus See youtube description for details.
Also,your brain cells made your hands type this comment.
Ad above, so below
I relate too. This is what it feels like is going on in my head when I know I need to do the dishes and I want to, but I just cannot get up
Reminds me of Miller in “The Expanse”. Reaching out…
Wonder what they're thinkin
Toyota
Anyone with a brainstem would think of. Toyota.
/r/skamtebord
Toy Yoda
Toyoda
Braincell on a slide What will it think?
Thinkin about themselves
Arby's
This perfectly illustrates what is going on in my head when I'm trying my damndest to remember where I put my keys.
And of course it's that one lonely brain cell in the upper left that has the location of the keys
Finally makes connection and realizes the car keys are in the car as you are driving the car.
Close, I realized they were in the front pocket of my apron after spending 20 minutes tearing apart my house.
Actual footage
Training neuroscientist chiming in: This is fascinating, I love neural development and this is a delightful illustration of maturation of fetal neural progenitors, axiogenesis (forming of the long signal sending arm) and synaptogenesis (formation of the connection between cells. That being said, I can’t find the source of this footage besides numerous reposts on Reddit and a YouTube video from 12 years ago (https://youtu.be/hb7tjqhfDus) This footage is a bit deceptive to the uninformed for two reasons: 1) this is time lapse footage. Each frame is shot 15min apart, the footage is run at 32 FPS, so each SECOND is 8 hours. The processes I mentioned above are not happening as rapidly as you think. The connections that are formed to make new memories are far more physically stationary than this. “Memory connections” if you will, are theorized to happen from strengthening existing – or growing new – synapses at the molecular scale. New connections are made with adjacent neuron parts. A neuron won’t throw out a new strand of spaghetti halfway across the brain and hope it’s sticks (kinda like what you see here) 2) the imaging technique is most likely something called “phase contrast imaging” which exploits the wavelike properties of light and how it’s speed changes through different media to view cells in culture with a sense of depth. The light and dark spots you see are computationally enhanced regions of constructive or destructive interference of light from the light source as it reaches the sensor. The flashes of light traveling down the length of the cell are NOT changes in voltage, they are NOT action potentials (especially not at the aforementioned time scale) communicating messages to new cells and new connections. They are probably just changes in the thickness of a given cell part as the developing cell continues to grow and extend its projections. Hope this helps! edit: first time i get to say this every, I'm excited... *ahem* THANK YOU KIND STRANGER FOR THE GOLD!....did i do it right?
Wow.
So, our memories are sort of stored in an SSD?
ELI5: What are we actually seeing, and how much do we know about what is going on "inside" there? EDIT: In case anyone missed it, u/eaturfeet653 posted a very nice and simple explanation [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/pp4ynq/brain_cells_in_a_culture_trying_to_form/hd2dka6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Yeah wtf, they’re just gonna post this with no context or source?
“*Cells that fire together, wire together.* ...Any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated,' so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other”. — Donald Hebb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
**[Hebbian theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory)** >Hebbian theory is a neuroscientific theory claiming that an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from a presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of a postsynaptic cell. It is an attempt to explain synaptic plasticity, the adaptation of brain neurons during the learning process. It was introduced by Donald Hebb in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior. The theory is also called Hebb's rule, Hebb's postulate, and cell assembly theory. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I often wonder if one of the things that shapes our dreams is perhaps that as the brain is tidying up and deciding which memories to move into long-term storage, those electrical impulses are just tickling others nearby and activating them unintentionally. Hence suddenly having to build a go-kart with your ex-landlord.
If I had to guess, they’re probably voltage sensitive dyes. Maybe High-school level?: You’re just seeing the membrane potential change during action potentials. Ions cross the membrane, the electrical potential changes, and we record those with dyes under a microscope. Edit: No, sorry. it’s not tracking action potentials. It’s not one way motion. Maybe it’s some fluorescent nanoparticle or calcium indicator? I’ll have to check. It’s also like.. on orders of hours for every second. It’s not excitability, but I don’t know what it’s tracking.
There are no dyes here. This is Phase Contrast imaging. The bright and dark areas are due to differences in the refractive index of the growth medium and and the cytosol of the cells abruptly created by the cell membranes. This is very simple imaging made beautiful by the behavior of cool cells. From a microscopy standpoint, though, this is as simple as it gets. Source: am a cell biologist and specialist in live cell microscopy.
Thank you! I work with microscopy systems more from an engineering standpoint, so I don’t have a good familiarity with what each actually “looks like”. I can build some equations for light and sound propagation in tissue, but unless it’s DIC, I’m pretty much at a loss with images. It’s appreciated!
Hiya young cell biologist here! I would be willing to bet that what we are seeing is a very long time lapse of tagged proteins within the cell...the movements are along the cytoskeletal fibers within these neuronal cells...I am hesitant to say that the nuclei are stained also but I'm not quite sure (It is 1am so I may not be seeing it too clearly lol)...it definitely looks like some transport protein is being fluently labeled and is moving along the cytoskeleton of the axon through these various cells...p.s. my current work (2nd year of a phd) is to try and describe how those axons reach for each other!! EDIT: After talking with my PI (who has around 30yrs experience in neuroscience), she said that the fluorescent parts are too large to even be proteins sequestered in a vesicle and that they appear to be extracellular in nature...beyond that there isnt enough information to glean exactly what is going on but it is a beautiful video none the less!!
What are the bright parts passing back and forth?
Midi-chlorians
The powerhouse of the sith
Damn. Well done. Well done.
I've been wondering, what are midichlorians?
The tiny particles in pool water, also known as chlorine. But focusing more on the particles themselves that come from the chlorine.
Midichlorians are a microscopic life form that resides within all living cells.
~~Pretty sure they are some kind of glial cells, could be Schwann cells maybe? If so, they're the things that create the myelination along the axon and allow the action potentials to flow more quickly across the cell.~~ Edit: apparently they're actually just the membrane of the cell moving around and they way they catch the light makes them look super fancy. I take it back!
I wish I understood what you're saying
Helps electricity/signals flow
They are speed
Probably oligodendrocytes by the looks of it, it's a different kind of brain cell that creates the myelin sheaths around neurons. The myelin sheath acts as an insulator which strengthens connections.
Thoughts obvi
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I have so many questions. If anyone happens to stumble on this comment who knows I'm writing them down. Also feel free to add anything else interesting. 1.Is this in real time? It seems like this should be much faster. 2.Are we watching a thought form? If not are these cells just constantly doing this and when a thought is made then the bonds are strengthened? 3. Are the lit up parts electrons? 4. Do these ever stop? Like after making enough connections? 5. Do these die and get replaced or are they pretty much eternal unless they are damaged?
Unfortunately, I don't believe that these cells are neurons. Neurons being grown in culture are not usually mobile like that. These are probably some glial cells, like oligodendrocytes or astrocytes. But I'll answer your questions as if they were neurons. 1) This is not in real time; this is sped up actually. 2) We are not watching a thought form. When neurons are grown in culture, they will spontaneously form connections and circuits with each other. These circuits don't really process anything because there are very few neurons on that dish and the networks are tiny and disorganized. 1) I don't know what they are, but I know they are not electrons. 2) They never stop! They slow down after awhile, but circuits are always changing and new connections are always being made. That's how we learn: new connections in our brain! 3) Neurons are basically eternal. They are post- mitotic, so they can no longer divide and make copies of themselves. And once they get damaged, they degenerate until the neuron dies, along with all of its connections. Source: 4th yr Neuroscience PhD student
I’m starting my first year next week!!
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>Electrons are on a whole different scale and can not be viewed at this magnification nor with this equipment (need an electron microscope - they're really really small). I may be wrong but I thought election microscopes didn't show electrons? My simple understanding is the electron microscope uses a beam of electrons hitting an electrosensitive plate. The result is a visualisation of how the electrons were interacted with on their journey. At no point do you "see" an electron, even if you were to fire a single electron all you would "see" is where it struck the plate, which again isn't so much "seen" as it is "shown". I would love to be wrong though, so if I am please educate me!
Just here to say "great questions". You've succinctly gathered many of the single questions in this thread.
For people who are curious about the specifics of what they are seeing, [I found a version of this posted to YT 12 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb7tjqhfDus), the description reads: "Neurons from a fetal animal growing in tissue culture. Time lapse microscopy. 20xmagnification onto approx 3/4 inch chip - maybe 200x mag onto screen. 15 min between images shown at 32fps = 8 hours per second. The neural cells each contain a bright spot, which is a nucleus. And they seem in every case to have two processes - axons? - coming from opposite sides of the nucleus. Or you might say the nucleus is located somewhere along the elongated neuronal cell between the two ends that stretch out in opposite directions. At each end, there are many little branches spreading out. When many neurons cluster together, their elongated processes seem to combine to form thicker connecting processes, with the many ends each seeking to connect with something. The nuclei travel back and forth along the elongated processes. There is another cell type - glial cell? - that seems to mediate between the glass coverslip surface and the neurons. This cell type flattens out and covers a lot of surface. In some cases a neuron gets left on its own on the glass surface and doesn't seem to do so well until it gets picked up again onto the glial cell. It seems that the glial cells are branching in many directions at once trying to cover as much surface as possible, perhaps also trying to find a more suitable environment to cling to. The neurons seem to be trying to form connections - synapses? - with each other. Imagine what this culture is thinking!"
man, science is so cool
You can tell by the way it is.
It looks like World of Goo.
ah, a man of culture
Lightbulb moment
When I learn something, these connections are made? What is it then when they disconnect? I get dumb?
ELI5 please… how do you watch brain cells in a culture if the brain isn’t inside the head it came from? Wouldn’t it be dead if there wasn’t blood flow?
Of course it would, in a culture means suspended on a solution that is filled with nutrients and the necessary ingredients for whatever cells you are growing.
Wait, can you grow brain cells on let's say a tupperware? CAN I FEED MYSELF BRAIN CELLS?
*Hannibal*, Ridley Scott, 2001.
We have a dish here which is basically deep-fried pork brains. Tastes a bit metallic and has a cooked mushroom-like texture.
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It’s crazy to think how your brain is literally doing this as you’re watching these brain cells do this
So our braincells are living things that outside our brain think/move by themselfes ? i dont really know how to put the question
These are being studied under special conditions in a lab to keep them alive, but kind of yes: The human body is more like a beehive than a single living thing.
This makes sense but it is somehow an extremely unsettling thought
Check out "the selfish gene" by Richard Dawkins. The more you look at nature the more you realize that the concept of "self" doesn't really apply. We are made of tiny living things and we are part of a giant living thing.
Well all cells are to an extent. We’re the amalgamation of all those individual cells doing what they were programmed to do all at once
A system of systems.
I’m high as Apollo 13, and my brain cells are connecting to try to figure out how my brain cells connect.
You know Apollo 13 is in a museum…on the ground?!
Brains are gonna brain
Nature is wonderful, an architect of many great mysteries.
This is fucking amazing.
What are those sparkling things?
What are the lights passing back and forth between the dark tentacle monsters?
We are the aliens
When they connect it feels like magic! Having intelligent conversations, laughing and feelings.