Neuroscientists Say They've Found an Entirely New Form of Neural Communication

main article link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1113&#x2F;JP276904" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1113&#x2F;JP276904</a><p>It seems as though the authors are advocating for the role of extracellular electric fields to enable spiking. This is known as ephaptic coupling, which is a fairly well studied phenomenon, but it is unknown the degree to which it contributes to standard computations and processing within different neural systems.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ephaptic_coupling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ephaptic_coupling</a>

I remember reading an article a while back and it went something like this. They had a digital circuit which implemented some function (might have been a filter, but no 100% sure). They let engineers design the circuit to perform the function. Then they let a computer iteratively (ML?) place the components to achieve that same function. It got so good that it was able to use less gates but some how worked just as well.<p>They were really confused and finally realized that unbeknownst to them the computer had taken advantage of the fact a moving charge creates a magnetic field and vice versa. This fact was exploited by the computer (inadvertently, lol).

&gt;The discovery offers some radical new insights about the way neurons might be talking to one another, via a mysterious process unrelated to conventionally understood mechanisms, such as synaptic transmission, axonal transport, and gap junction connections.<p>One of the most humbling books I have ever read is <i>Wetware</i> by Dennis Bray. There is an unbelievable richness when it comes to computation and storage&#x2F;transport of information in biological organisms and cells that are simply unparalleled.<p>I feel this is especially relevant given that we are (again) living in times where people talk a lot about the &#x27;intelligence&#x27; or power of contemporary learning machines.

I know it&#x27;s early stuff, and I am not an expert on this by any means, but I wonder if any of this would be something applicable to a biological means for &quot;backpropagation&quot;?<p>Just to clarify: As far as I am aware, there hasn&#x27;t been any biological equivalent for neural learning akin to what is called &quot;backpropagation&quot; as used by common implementations of artificial neural networks in order to learn and generalize a task or function.<p>That there has only been a &quot;forward signal&quot; from neuron to neuron observed, with no way for error signals to move &quot;backwards&quot; adjusting the &quot;connection weights&quot; of biological neurons (note: this is not how biological neurons work at all; that much I do know - I am just simplifying a bit here).<p>Could this new communication form potentially be used for such error propagation for learning? I know the article seemed to make the idea that it only happens in &quot;slow waves&quot; and during &quot;sleep&quot;; but I wonder if it isn&#x27;t actually happening all the time...?<p>Well - now I am just speculating on a subject I have little to no knowledge in, so I will stop here.

&gt; Scientists think they&#x27;ve identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they&#x27;ve been surgically severed.<p>Now it sounds curious why it can&#x27;t leap wirelessly from one brain to another one this way.

I&#x27;m surprised to see no mention of the two mechanisms that jump out at me as candidate explanations: a) standard electrical induction b) standard conductance via the extracellular matrix (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Extracellular_matrix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Extracellular_matrix</a>)<p>W&#x2F;r&#x2F;t b), they do claim that they sliced the hippocampus and then observed activity induced across the preserved gap, but it&#x27;s not clear (from my light read) that the tissues weren&#x27;t still touching such that the axons&#x2F;dendrites were gapped, but the ECM was not; if this were the case, then I&#x27;d expect signals to propagate across severed neuronal connections via standard conductance in the ECM.<p>More please!

This is extremely interesting and basically boils down to the following neurological observation:<p>Anything (molecules, electric charge, magnetic fields etc) that is originally created by brain activity and itself detectable by other parts of the brain - what ever those are (mostly neurons, axons or dendrites I suppose) was factored in during the evolution of the brain and is henceforth utilized as a signal. That&#x27;s why the brain is so incredibly complex and the classical neural network model doesn&#x27;t cut it.<p>In other terms if X is systematically caused by A and is then affecting some B then that X will at some point serve as a signal factored into the neural processing and is no longer just noise! This happens evolutionarily over millions of years as well as dynamically in context of neural plasticity to some extent.<p>The same concept is true for anything in the body - which is why the separation of the body into modules &#x2F; organs is problematic. But the effect is much more potent in the brain due to the high density of signalling and processing.

It almost sounds as if there is neuron like behavior that emerges due to the information available in the raw electrical phenomena of the brain. It could be analogous to a machine learning circuit where the substrate itself responds neuron like to the overall electrical loading of the board.

Reminds me of Arc proteins <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;breakthrough-memory-formation-virus-hiv-protein-infects-brain-arc-778236" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;breakthrough-memory-formation-virus...</a>

Is this different from retinal waves? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Retinal_waves" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Retinal_waves</a>

It reminds me a little of this impossible reactionless space drive.

Might be Dunning–Kruger speaking, but I&#x27;d be surprised if that was <i>not</i> the case, and I am surprised that this seems to be a <i>new</i> area of exploration.<p>I mean, think about it: we&#x27;re talking about a network of electromagnetically unshielded electrical devices, swimming in a sea of conductors, that is believed to have evolved its functionality over time. Since evolution is a random optimization process, why <i>wouldn&#x27;t</i> it exploit electromagnetic properties of the environment, if they&#x27;re reliable enough? It&#x27;s not like evolution understands the concept of a wire, or chemical signal.<p>(Also reminds me of that story of an FPGA design generated by genetic algorithm, which ended up exploiting the electrical properties of the particular chip&#x2F;board onto which it was uploaded.)

This will soon be cited by quacks as “evidence“ for their overpriced uselesss therapies.<p>Bioresonance, Homeopathy, Reiki, ...? „Brain cells communicate wirelessly, and my method integrates with that communication!“

Telepathy of a sort, at least over microscopic distances!<p>Anyway, I wonder if the fields can be externally applied for therapeutic purposes (inducing sleep etc)