Word: neurone
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Spinning Rabbits. The neuron's basic function is to transmit "nerve impulses" by high-speed electrochemical reactions. Hyden's team devised an ingenious way to find out what happens to nerve cells when they receive a stimulus. The scientists spun rabbits on a centrifuge, just fast enough to make them dizzy and cause the cells in the acoustic nerve and the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear (a center of balance) to stimulate the brain with a sense of distress. Then they painlessly killed the animals and analyzed the nerve cells...
Stimulation, they found, resulted in a marked increase in the neurons' content of enzyme proteins, while the glial cells showed a corresponding drop. The glial cells behave like the self-sacrificing wife who eats mostly potatoes and gives the high-energy meat to her ditchdigger husband. The "information" contained in the protein which the neuron forms, reasons Hyden, becomes the impulse that the neuron sends along the filaments to other neighboring neurons...
Modified Proteins. The higher brain functions of memory and reasoning, Hyden hypothesizes, are achieved by the way the neuron alters the protein it forms. Each neuron contains millions of molecules of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Each of these molecules is chemically keyed by the arrangement of its internal building blocks. These molecules dictate, in accordance with their keys, the nature of the proteins that the neuron forms, in cooperation with the glial cells. The modified proteins are the chemical representations of thoughts...
...next step is machines that can do more than answer just yes or no; they would, in effect, reason by considering alternatives, reach "under the circumstances" conclusions. Bell has already reconstructed a neuron, the basic element of the human brain, electronically, will ..try linking several together in a "neural net" duplicating nerve tissue. Eventually they hope to devise a computer able to freely associate ideas. IBM and others are trying to control molecules to work as a new kind of transistor, make a computer whose components will "feel" each other's information, come to qualitative decisions...
When a pulse or several of them do pass, the second neuron "fires," sending out a pulse of its own. Out of such single pulses-billions of them flashing in zigzags and rivers through the thinking brain-human thoughts and decisions are built...