Neurons in sentence

459 examples of Neurons in a sentence

And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per day.

So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect.

So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special.

Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons?

When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason.

They just can't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons.

We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day.

And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons.

So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos.

To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons.

So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons.

Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do.

With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible.

So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long.

So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them.

My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities.

And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex?

It turns out that these sea hares have a small number of very large neurons, which makes them excellent to use in neuroscience research.

Mice reared in a standard cage, by contrast, not dissimilar, you might say, from a prison cell, have dramatically lower levels of new neurons in the brain.

Neurophysiologists have found neurons in the brain that respond to other people's actions the same way they respond to our own.

So like a person blindly rooting about in a bag, she finds the brain, and she injects it with venom into two very specific clusters of neurons.

We're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we're identifying those genes, those proteins, those molecules, understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work, understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work, and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior, and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition.

And we're trying to understand why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants as neurons, using models from neuroscience.

So just as a neuron adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to fire, an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide whether to forage.

We talk about the brain, but of course every brain is slightly different, and maybe there are some individuals or some conditions in which the electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more stimulus to fire, and that would lead to differences in brain function.

There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs.

Scientists in my lab are creating a technology for quickly mapping the synaptic connections in the brain to tell which neurons are talking to which other neurons and how that conversation changes throughout life and during illness.

The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity, that is, where neurons are firing.

When they get active, they need increased blood flow to supply that activity, and lucky for us, blood flow control to the brain is local, so if a bunch of neurons, say, right there get active and start firing, then blood flow increases just right there.

With diffusion imaging, you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain, and with this method shown here, you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain, potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain.

Related words