An Electrodynamic Theory of the Brain
Dear Colleagues, What is a meter? If you say a unit length, you are correct. However, the meter is not just any unit of length, but one that is relevant for you as a human. Mature humans are around 1.70m high, and walk comfortably at 1m/s. But why do we use the meter at all, when it comes to expressing events and distances encountered in the brain? A commonly held biophysical dogma says that magnetic interactions occurring among neighboring compartments of biological tissues, such as for example the different neurons in a brain, can be ignored. The typical argument used to give credit to all biophysical theories rooted in electrostatic is related to the observation that the vast majority of all electrical events within living tissues propagate are incredibly low speeds. Thus, since action potentials (APs), that is, sharp fluctuations of the electric field, are seen to propagate at speeds between 1 and 100 m/s, any dynamic induction phenomena arising due to the presence of such an event is apriorily excluded. And indeed, with meter-long sensors there is hardly any significant electrodynamics signals to be recorded. However, acknowledging that the AP is playing a decisive role in the chemical transmission cycle, we could express the AP's speed in units that are relevant to this process. Since the dendritic spine is an integral part of the chemical transmission machinery, we could introduce a new unit of length and call it the "dendritic-spine-head" to mean 1 micro-meter, or 10^-6 m. Thus, referring to the spine as an observer of the AP, this event propagates at 1,000,000 "dendritic-spine-heads"/s. From the perspective of a spine, the production of such an event is anything but a stationary phenomenon, appearing necessary to consider what an electrodynamic theory might say about the interactions between an incoming electrical pulse and a fixed spine. In following this route, I came to the conclusion that all biological organisms can be easily decomposed into a finite set of disjoint, and electrically insulated volumes, that appear to function as a set of nested highly-exotic electromagnetic antennae. If this view can be maintained, understanding brains as room-temperature quantum computers, and life as a globally coherent state within some finite reach, is inevitable. I present this theory in a preprint entitled Dynamic Aspects of Finite Architectures (http://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.20815.79527), and invite you to read, comment and share this manuscript. Best regards, Dinu Patirniche.
participants (1)
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Patirniche, Dinu