neuron

And there's a Stanford neurologist called Joseph Parvizi who gave us one of the cleanest looks into what this does.

So in 2013, Parvizi's team published a study in Neuron where he described these two patients that he had.

And they'd had epilepsy.

And he had electrodes implanted to map where their seizures were coming from.

The signal from your sensory receptors has to first travel along your neurons from your foot to your brain.

When the message reaches the end of one neuron, it encounters a tiny gap called a synapse.

To keep the message going, neurons release molecules called neurotransmitters, which carry the message across the gap and onto the next neuron.

and the next and the next, like a line of dominoes falling over, until the signal hits your brain.

Once that last domino falls, it's goodbye bliss and hello pain.

Though we're pretty sure humans don't have those, but research is ongoing.

In any case, this information is all used in more or less the same way.

The signals from the receptors travel along neurons, jump synapses, and get processed by the central nervous system, and then trigger a response.

Yeah.

Neurons do not have to be taught how to network.

They just do it.

They just do it.

First, the cortical level.

neurons up there generating stable rhythms, each neuron and neuron cluster having its own characteristic rhythm.

How do you generate a rhythm within a single neuron? How would an individual neuron be a pacemaker like that? You get this paradoxical yin-yang sort of thing where the process by which a neuron gets excited then triggers the process by which it's inhibited.

which triggers the excitation, a loop like this.

How do cortical neurons generate rhythms on the level of cortical networks? Simple.

You got...

Neuron A stimulates neuron B, stimulates neuron A, back and forth for the rest of time.

That's going to form a faster beat than neuron A stimulates neuron B, stimulates neuron C, stimulates neuron A.

It's just, it doesn't come back.

You know, is there a way, something that can be done to allow the body's own natural neuroplasticity to be engaged either Intra-neuron within that affected neuron itself or inter-neuron, like somehow a fiber pass, if you will, if we're saying, okay, this nerve cell is cooked, but can others around there pick up and do the same thing? Enough.

to make the problems unnoticeable to the person who has this condition, people do have return to function.

So that is what I would have to say in answer to that question.

I completely agree.

I'm chuckling because there's this really wonderful paper that was published in Neuron, which is a Cell Press journal.

It's a really, a fine journal that basically shows that there's a really strong dopamine release and reinforcement, a reward for, uh, validating one's own beliefs.

Yeah.

He started, you know, he's like, he had a background in martial arts and dance and all these things, and he, we were talking about will and discipline, and he said, "You know, it's so important to use willpower, but just enough to allow you to move into whatever it is you're trying to do and then Really tr- trying to bring elements of ease and play into it.

You know, because I worked on stress for a long time in my lab, and stress control is a big thing and, you know, but we have neural energy, right? Our, our neurons, our nervous system, which controls our muscles and everything else, uh, our movements, our thoughts.

It is electrochemical, right? Neurons release chemicals which does electrical firing in other neurons and on and on.

That's the nervous system.

You don't have any proof that other people can't read your mind.

The neurons in our brains that are responsible for remembering what neurons are are super meta.

Since fractions can represent numbers greater than one, technically everything takes a fraction of a second.

It's easy to sleep in, but not easy to go to sleep early.

Uh, I love that place.

He's published over 100 scientific papers and journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron.

He's a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the advisory committee for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He's also the author of books Ignorance and Failure, and he lives in New York City, and he has a new book out.