I took a break from artificial networks to study neuroscience for a couple years.
We hardly understand how a single synapse works - and we have trillions of them.
To anyone interested in this article I highly recommend “The Cerebral Code” by William Calvin. (<a href="https://williamcalvin.com/bk9/index.htm" rel="nofollow">https://williamcalvin.com/bk9/index.htm</a>)<p>It’s the only theory of how the brain works that I’ve come across that seems like it could be valid. Unfortunately, like other posters have already mentioned, neuroscience is incredibly complex and we just don’t have the tools to test it.<p>Even if it ends up being completely wrong, it’s a beautiful theory and well worth checking out!
We keep plugging biology into our understanding of physics, which I believe, is the greatest limitation to our understanding. We don't know what we don't know.<p>What I mean by this is that we thought we understood the body when we understood thermodynamics. The blood pumps through the heart, goes to the brain, nutrients feed the muscles, etc etc.
Then we discovered how electricity works and we thought "oh! of course, it's all electric!" The heart pumps because of electricity, and the nerves are all electric synapses, etc etc.<p>I fully expect in the future we will look at quantum mechanics and apply that to our understanding of biology (if we aren't doing that yet), and down the rabbit hole we will continue.<p>That doesn't mean we can't do some incredible things with our current understanding of the brain, I work in neurotech at <a href="https://affectablesleep.com" rel="nofollow">https://affectablesleep.com</a>, where we are increasing the effectiveness of deep sleep. We know the mechanism we can use to trick the brain to increasing the synchronous firing of neurons which define deep sleep, but we don't know WHY it works.
"Human brain is too big to be understood with current technology, that's why scientists use simpler organisms to study brain. Flatworm's brain has 52 neurons. We have no idea how it works."<p>I've read this few years ago, how far we've come?
I would think a large part of the problem is the difficulty in observing a working brain.<p>There are very few non-destructive ways we can get a look into a brain while it is living. And even research into ways we can look into a living brain is hindered by the fact we don't want to harm the person being observed.<p>I could see that making progress a lot slower
If you find this interesting, the Theories of Everything podcast with Curt Jaimungal does a good job exploring this topic. The neuroscience-centered conversations focus mostly on consciousness, but they still discuss similar problems with measuring and explaining how consciousness comes about from a collection of matter.
it looks like we can now actually use brains as computers: <a href="https://corticallabs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://corticallabs.com/</a>
We are just now uncovering an underlying principle of science: ‘everything is a wave.’<p>Neurological connective tissues and their corresponding signals may be more of a symptom of electrical wave action rather than a signaling nexus.<p>Everything is a wave. Everything is a probabilistic wave form with probabilistic outcomes.<p>Once science understands these waves and their myriad forms, we may have a greater understanding of our own wires and grey matter signaling.