Neurons in sentence

459 examples of Neurons in a sentence

Research shows that our brain has a lot of neurons that are dedicated to recognizing human faces, so this N170 spike could be all those neurons firing at once in the same location, and we can detect that in the EEG.

They have about a half a billion neurons that are distributed throughout their body, such that two-thirds of the neurons are actually in its legs.

Squid have taught us about how our neurons communicate, and the horseshoe crab has taught us about how our eyes work.

I mean, we don't know the detailed answer, but we know the basic part of the answer, and that is, there is a sequence of neuron firings, and they terminate where the acetylcholine is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons.

Sorry to use philosophical terminology here, but when it's secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons, a whole lot of wonderful things happen in the ion channels and the damned arm goes up.

We started physiotherapy, we started the rehabilitation, and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot.

Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains, exactly now, as you watch me doing this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions.

There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces.

For this, I leveraged 20 years of past research in neuroscience, first to replace the missing fuel with pharmacological agents that prepare the neurons in the spinal cord to fire, and second, to mimic the accelerator pedal with electrical stimulation.

Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain.

This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons.

Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities.

If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be.

Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons.

Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain.

Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex.

So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals?

Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from.

It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter.

So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way.

Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons.

But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain.

The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be.

We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities.

But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean.

Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain.

So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos.

And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate.

So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons.

Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math.

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