ELife: the mechanism of brain cells in making complex decisions

January 6, 2019 / BIOON / -- new research shows that the activity characteristics of neurons in the brain can be much more complex than previously thought in the decision-making process In a study published in eLife, Dr Aaron Kerlin, an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota School of medicine, developed a new microscope that can quickly image a large range of dendritic structures Through his research, Dr Kerlin found that the signal input of small "dendritic" segments adjacent to neurons tended to represent information about the action to be taken (image source: www Pixabay Com) the results show that in the decision-making process, there are many small dendrites in each neuron, which process the information before sending it to other neurons This shows that through many small pieces of dendrites, more complex processing mechanisms will occur in the brain These findings not only help researchers understand the overall computing power of the brain, but also help them better understand some diseases In many cognitive disorders, including autism, protein damage (connections between neurons) known to be related to synaptic function may be involved "With these findings and methods, we may have a better understanding of what happens in diseases that affect synaptic function and why they affect information processing in this way," Dr Kerlin said Dr Kerlin believes that future research may include investigating the local processing of neurons in the autistic mouse model to determine which dendritic structures have damaged computing power and the scale of the damage Dr Kerlin also created a web browser that made the entire data publicly available to other researchers He hopes that this will encourage other researchers to use this rich data set to make new discoveries and start further research in this field Source of information: Subcellular computations within brain during decision-making source of information: Aaron Kerlin, Mohar Boaz, Daniel Flickinger, Bryan J MacLennan, Matthew B Dean, Courtney Davis, Nelson streston, Karel Svoboda Functional clustering of dynamic activities during decision-making making.e-life, 2019; 8 doi: 10.7554/e-life.46966