Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, ‘Mind Matters’

 Illustration by Joanna Gebal.

Source: Guglielmi, Giorgia. A new way to capture the brain’s electrical symphony. Nature 561, 300-302 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06694-6

We all know what an orchestra looks like. There is a conductor who coordinates instruments from different families to produce a symphony. If our brain is like an orchestra, each cell is a different instrument, and the music is a thought or emotion. So who conducts the brain’s orchestra?

We have around one hundred billion neurons in our head and each neuron is linked to as many as ten thousand others! Neurons influence each other through a combination of chemical and electrical signals. So how do these random signals work together so we can think, feel, or understand the world?

Francis Crick thinks he knows. 

Eventually, in the 1980s, a 70 year old Crick was able to devote his full attention to his other interest, consciousness. While doing research at the Salk Institute, he worked with Christopher Koch to study questions like “how we can reflect on things?” or “how do we understand life?”. 

Crick and Koch mainly hypothesized that there may be places in the brain that can pull all of the information from many neurons together in one place, which allows us to start to understand the world. Though there isn’t a real conductor in our brains, they thought the brain was conducted by a small and elongated structure called claustrum, beneath the cerebral cortex. It's considered to be the most densely connected structure in the brain, which makes it the perfect place to synchronize millions of different signals to produce thoughts, or our brain’s version of a symphony!

Many years later, neuroscientists still aren’t sure whether their hypothesis was true. The brain is so complex, which makes it hard to study! Clearly, there are still many exciting things to be discovered about our brains. 

References

https://scienceobserved.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/francis-crick-thinking-about-the-brain-in-1985/

https://radiolab.org/podcast/91503-the-unconscious-toscanini-of-the-brain

Edited by Alexandra Fink