Biological neural network - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...

, a biological neural network describes a population of physically interconnected neuron

Neuron

A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...

s or a group of disparate neurons whose inputs or signalling targets define a recognizable circuit. Communication between neurons often involves an electrochemical process. The interface through which they interact with surrounding neurons usually consists of several dendrites (input connections), which are connected via synapse

Synapse

In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell...

s to other neurons, and one axon

Axon

An axon is a long, slender projection of a nerve cell, or neuron, that conducts electrical impulses away from the neuron's cell body or soma....

(output connection). If the sum of the input signals surpasses a certain threshold

Threshold potential

The threshold potential is the membrane potential to which a membrane must be depolarized to initiate an action potential.It often can be between −40 and -55 mV, but it can vary based upon several factors...

, the neuron sends an action potential

Action potential

In physiology, an action potential is a short-lasting event in which the electrical membrane potential of a cell rapidly rises and falls, following a consistent trajectory. Action potentials occur in several types of animal cells, called excitable cells, which include neurons, muscle cells, and...

(AP) at the axon hillock

Axon hillock

The axon hillock is a specialized part of the cell body of a neuron that connects to the axon. As a result, the axon hillock is the last site in the soma where membrane potentials propagated from synaptic inputs are summated before being transmitted to the axon. For many years it was believed...

and transmits this electrical signal along the axon.

In contrast, a neuronal circuit is a functional entity of interconnected neurons that influence each other (similar to a control loop in cybernetics

Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...

Early study

Early treatments of neural networks can be found in Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....

's Principles of Psychology, 3rd edition (1872), Theodor Meynert

Theodor Meynert

Theodor Hermann Meynert was a German-Austrian neuropathologist and anatomist who was born in Dresden.In 1861 he earned his medical doctorate, and in 1875 became director of the psychiatric clinic associated with the University of Vienna. One of his better known students in Vienna was Sigmund...

's Psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

(1884), William James

William James

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

' Principles of Psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

(1890), and Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

's Project for a Scientific Psychology (composed 1895). The first rule of neuronal learning was described by Hebb

Donald Olding Hebb

Donald Olding Hebb FRS was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning...

in 1949, Hebbian learning. Thus, Hebbian pairing of pre-synaptic and post-synaptic activity can substantially alter the dynamic characteristics of the synaptic connection and therefore facilitate or inhibit signal transmission. The neuroscientists Warren Sturgis McCulloch

Warren Sturgis McCulloch

Warren Sturgis McCulloch was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement.- Biography :...

and Walter Pitts

Walter Pitts

Walter Harry Pitts, Jr. was a logician who worked in the field of cognitive psychology.He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science,...

published the first works on the processing of neural networks called "What the frog's eye tells to the frog's brain." They showed theoretically that networks of artificial neurons could implement

Implementation

Implementation is the realization of an application, or execution of a plan, idea, model, design, specification, standard, algorithm, or policy.-Computer Science:...

logic

Logic

In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...

al, arithmetic

Arithmetic

Arithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations. It involves the study of quantity, especially as the result of combining numbers...

, and symbol

Symbol

A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...

ic functions. Simplified models of biological neurons were set up, now usually called perceptrons or artificial neurons. These simple models accounted for neural summation, i.e., potentials at the post-synaptic membrane will summate in the cell body. Later models also provided for excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission.

Connections between neurons

The connections between neurons are much more complex than those implemented in neural computing architectures. The basic kinds of connections between neurons are chemical synapse

Chemical synapse

Chemical synapses are specialized junctions through which neurons signal to each other and to non-neuronal cells such as those in muscles or glands. Chemical synapses allow neurons to form circuits within the central nervous system. They are crucial to the biological computations that underlie...

s and electrical

Electrical synapse

An electrical synapse is a mechanical and electrically conductive link between two abutting neurons that is formed at a narrow gap between the pre- and postsynaptic neurons known as a gap junction. At gap junctions, such cells approach within about 3.5 nm of each other, a much shorter...

gap junction

Gap junction

A gap junction or nexus is a specialized intercellular connection between a multitude of animal cell-types. It directly connects the cytoplasm of two cells, which allows various molecules and ions to pass freely between cells....

s. One principle by which neurons work is neural summation, i.e. potentials at the post synaptic membrane will sum up in the cell body. If the depolarization

Depolarization

In biology, depolarization is a change in a cell's membrane potential, making it more positive, or less negative. In neurons and some other cells, a large enough depolarization may result in an action potential...

of the neuron at the axon goes above threshold an action potential will occur that travels down the axon to the terminal endings to transmit a signal to other neurons. Excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission is realized mostly by inhibitory postsynaptic potential

Inhibitory postsynaptic potential

An inhibitory postsynaptic potential is a synaptic potential that decreases the chance that a future action potential will occur in a postsynaptic neuron or α-motoneuron...

s and excitatory postsynaptic potential

Excitatory postsynaptic potential

In neuroscience, an excitatory postsynaptic potential is a temporary depolarization of postsynaptic membrane potential caused by the flow of positively charged ions into the postsynaptic cell as a result of opening of ligand-sensitive channels...

s.

On the electrophysiological level, there are various phenomena which alter the response characteristics of individual synapses (called synaptic plasticity

Synaptic plasticity

In neuroscience, synaptic plasticity is the ability of the connection, or synapse, between two neurons to change in strength in response to either use or disuse of transmission over synaptic pathways. Plastic change also results from the alteration of the number of receptors located on a synapse...

) and individual neurons (intrinsic plasticity). These are often divided into short-term plasticity and long-term plasticity. Long-term synaptic plasticity is often contended to be the most likely memory

Memory

In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....

substrate. Usually the term "plasticity" refers to changes in the brain that are caused by activity or experience.

Connections display temporal and spatial characteristics. Temporal characteristics refer to the continuously modified activity-dependent efficacy of synaptic transmission, called spike

Action potential

-dependent synaptic plasticity. It has been observed in several studies that the synaptic efficacy of this transmission can undergo short-term increase (called facilitation) or decrease (depression) according to the activity of the presynaptic neuron. The induction of long-term changes in synaptic efficacy, by long-term potentiation

Long-term potentiation

In neuroscience, long-term potentiation is a long-lasting enhancement in signal transmission between two neurons that results from stimulating them synchronously. It is one of several phenomena underlying synaptic plasticity, the ability of chemical synapses to change their strength...

(LTP) or depression

Long-term depression

Long-term depression , in neurophysiology, is an activity-dependent reduction in the efficacy of neuronal synapses lasting hours or longer. LTD occurs in many areas of the CNS with varying mechanisms depending upon brain region and developmental progress...

(LTD), depends strongly on the relative timing of the onset of the EPSP

Excitatory postsynaptic potential

generated by the pre-synaptic AP, and the post-synaptic action potential. LTP is induced by a series of action potentials which cause a variety of biochemical responses. Eventually the reactions cause the insertion of new receptors into the cellular membrane of the dendrites, or serve to increase the efficacy of the receptors through phosphorylation

Phosphorylation

Phosphorylation is the addition of a phosphate group to a protein or other organic molecule. Phosphorylation activates or deactivates many protein enzymes....

.

Backpropagating APs are impossible because after an action potential travels down a given segment of the axon, the voltage gated sodium channels' (Na+ channels) m gate becomes closed, thus blocking any transient opening of the h gate from causing a change in the intracellular [Na+], and hence preventing the generation of an action potential back towards the cell body. In some cells, however, neural backpropagation

Neural backpropagation

Neural backpropagation is the phenomenon in which the action potential of a neuron creates a voltage spike both at the end of the axon and back through to the dendritic arbor or dendrites, from which much of the original input current originated...

does occur through the dendritic arbor

Dendrite

Dendrites are the branched projections of a neuron that act to conduct the electrochemical stimulation received from other neural cells to the cell body, or soma, of the neuron from which the dendrites project...

and may have important effects on synaptic plasticity and computation.

A neuron in the brain requires a single impulse to a neuromuscular junction to fire for the contraction of the postsynaptic muscle cell. In the spinal cord, however, at least 75 afferent

Afferent nerve

In the nervous system, afferent neurons , carry nerve impulses from receptors or sense organs towards the central nervous system. This term can also be used to describe relative connections between structures. Afferent neurons communicate with specialized interneurons...

neurons are required to produce firing. This picture is further complicated by variation in time constant between neurons, as some cells can experience their EPSPs over a wider period of time than others.

While in synapses in the developing brain

Cognitive development

Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of brain development and cognitive psychology compared to an adult's point of...

synaptic depression has been particularly widely observed it has been speculated that it changes to facilitation in adult brains.

Representations in neural networks

A receptive field

Receptive field

The receptive field of a sensory neuron is a region of space in which the presence of a stimulus will alter the firing of that neuron. Receptive fields have been identified for neurons of the auditory system, the somatosensory system, and the visual system....

is a small region within the entire visual field. Any given neuron only responds to a subset of stimuli

Stimulus (physiology)

In physiology, a stimulus is a detectable change in the internal or external environment. The ability of an organism or organ to respond to external stimuli is called sensitivity....

within its receptive field. This property is called tuning. As for vision

Visual system

The visual system is the part of the central nervous system which enables organisms to process visual detail, as well as enabling several non-image forming photoresponse functions. It interprets information from visible light to build a representation of the surrounding world...

, in the earlier visual areas, neurons have simpler tuning. For example, a neuron in V1 may fire to any vertical stimulus in its receptive field. In the higher visual areas, neurons have complex tuning. For example, in the fusiform gyrus, a neuron may only fire when a certain face appears in its receptive field. It is also known that many parts of the brain generate patterns of electrical activity that correspond closely to the layout of the retinal image (this is known as retinotopy

Retinotopy

Retinotopy describes the spatial organization of the neuronal responses to visual stimuli. In many locations within the brain, adjacent neurons have receptive fields that include slightly different, but overlapping portions of the visual field. The position of the center of these receptive fields...

). It seems further that imagery that originates from the senses and internally generated imagery may have a shared ontology

Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

at higher levels of cortical

Cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex is a sheet of neural tissue that is outermost to the cerebrum of the mammalian brain. It plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. It is constituted of up to six horizontal layers, each of which has a different...

processing (see e.g. Language of thought

Language of thought

In philosophy of mind, the language of thought hypothesis put forward by American philosopher Jerry Fodor describes thoughts as represented in a "language" that allows complex thoughts to be built up by combining simpler thoughts in various ways...

). About many parts of the brain some characterization has been made as to what tasks are correlated with its activity.

In the brain, memories

Memory

are very likely represented by patterns of activation amongst networks of neurons. However, how these representations

Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...

are formed, retrieved and reach conscious awareness

Awareness

Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of...

is not completely understood. Cognitive processes that characterize human intelligence are mainly ascribed to the emergent properties

Emergence

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....

of complex dynamic characteristics in the complex systems

Complex systems

Complex systems present problems in mathematical modelling.The equations from which complex system models are developed generally derive from statistical physics, information theory and non-linear dynamics, and represent organized but unpredictable behaviors of systems of nature that are considered...

that constitute neural networks. Therefore, the study and modeling of these networks have attracted broad interest under different paradigms and many different theories have been formulated to explain various aspects of their behavior. One of these — and the subject of several theories — is considered a special property of a neural network: the ability to learn

Learning

Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

complex patterns.

Philosophical issues

Today most researchers believe in mental representation

Mental representation

A representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that makes use of such a symbol; "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types...

s of some kind (representationalism) or, more general, in particular mental states (cognitivism

Cognitivism (psychology)

In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that came into usage in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition...

). For instance, perception

Perception

Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

can be viewed as information processing

Information processing

Information processing is the change of information in any manner detectable by an observer. As such, it is a process which describes everything which happens in the universe, from the falling of a rock to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system...

through transfer information from the world into the brain/mind

Mind

The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...

where it is further processed and related to other information (cognitive processes). Few others envisage a direct path back into the external world in the form of action (radical behaviorism

Behaviorism

Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...

).

Another issue, called the binding problem

Binding problem

The binding problem is one of a number of terms at the interface between neuroscience and philosophy which suffer from being used in several different ways, often in a context that does not explicitly indicate which way the term is being used. Of the many possible usages, two common versions may be...

, relates to the question of how the activity of more or less distinct populations of neurons dealing with different aspects of perception

Perception

are combined to form a unified perceptual experience and have qualia

Qualia

Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...

.

Neuronal networks are not full reconstructions of any cognitive system found in the human brain, and are therefore unlikely to form a complete representation of human perception. Some researchers argue that human perception must be studied as a whole; hence, the system cannot be taken apart and studied without destroying its original functionality. Furthermore, there is evidence that cognition is gained through a well-orchestrated barrage of sub-threshold synaptic activity throughout the network.

Study methods

Different neuroimaging

Neuroimaging

Neuroimaging includes the use of various techniques to either directly or indirectly image the structure, function/pharmacology of the brain...

techniques have been developed to investigate the activity of neural networks. The use of "brain scanners" or functional neuroimaging to investigate the structure or function of the brain is common, either as simply a way of better assessing brain injury with high resolution pictures, or by examining the relative activations of different brain areas. Such technologies may include fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), PET

Positron emission tomography

Positron emission tomography is nuclear medicine imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide , which is introduced into the body on a...

(positron emission tomography) and CAT (computed axial tomography). Functional neuroimaging

Functional neuroimaging

Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions...

uses specific brain imaging technologies to take scans from the brain, usually when a person is doing a particular task, in an attempt to understand how the activation of particular brain areas is related to the task. In functional neuroimaging, especially fMRI, which measures hemodynamic activity that is closely linked to neural activity, PET, and electroencephalography

Electroencephalography

Electroencephalography is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp. EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain...

(EEG) is used.

Connectionist

Connectionism

Connectionism is a set of approaches in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units...

models serve as a test platform for different hypotheses of representation, information processing, and signal transmission. Lesioning studies in such models, e.g. artificial neural network

Artificial neural network

An artificial neural network , usually called neural network , is a mathematical model or computational model that is inspired by the structure and/or functional aspects of biological neural networks. A neural network consists of an interconnected group of artificial neurons, and it processes...

s, where parts of the nodes are deliberately destroyed to see how the network performs, can also yield important insights in the working of several cell assemblies. Similarly, simulations of dysfunctional neurotransmitters in neurological conditions (e.g., dopamine in the basal ganglia of Parkinson's

Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system...

patients) can yield insights into the underlying mechanisms for patterns of cognitive deficits observed in the particular patient group. Predictions from these models can be tested in patients and/or via pharmacological manipulations, and these studies can in turn be used to inform the models, making the process recursive.

External links

Learning, Memory and Plasticity
Comparison of Neural Networks in the Brain and Artificial Neural Networks
Lecture notes at MIT OpenCourseWare
Computation in the Brain
Signaling Properties of the Neuron
The Problem of Neuronal Coding
Biological Neural Network Toolbox - A free Matlab toolbox for simulating networks of several different types of neurons
WormWeb.org: Interactive Visualization of the C. elegans Neural Network - C. elegans, a nematode with 302 neurons, is the only organism for whom the entire neural network has been uncovered. Use this site to browse through the network and to search for paths between any 2 neurons.
Introduction to Neurons and Neuronal Networks, Neuroscience Online (electronic neuroscience textbook)

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