Member-only story
Neural Synchronization in the brain
Waking up in the morning for most of us is a strange thing…we usually think of this period as one in which we go from an unconscious or semi conscious state to one where we are conscious, but we usually don’t immediately become fully conscious of our surroundings, circumstances or what it is we have planned for the day, it is a gradual affair that takes time, sometimes seconds and sometimes minutes ( and sometimes coffee ).
The neurobiology of this process is poorly understood, but amongst those that study the nuts and bolts of consciousness* (myself included), it is believed that this gradual awareness of the self and the environment arises as populations of neurons communicate in between them; and more importantly get synchronized with one another, which is the subject of this post.
As part of my research I’ve been working on making live neural network simulators which model groups of neurons and how they fire, here’s a first prototype…
To help understand what it does, take this illustration of 3 Biological Neurons :
And here are 3 Digital Neurons being placed, connected and firing:
Technical Notes: Each neuron starts with a base Neurotransmitter level of 0.4 and self releases Neurotransmitters at a rate of 0.1/frame, connections( axons ) have a fixed weight of 0.1 and turn red when firing along with the soma of their respective neurons, synapses are indicated by dots outside target neurons, neurotransmitters are all excitatory and the frame rate is about 20 frames/second, in short a model of biological neurons which has been slowed down and tied up to graph notation to make things easier to…
