"A team of researchers at the Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea has created a new organic nanowires that simulate the functioning of biological synapsesThe highways of our brains. The merit of the breakthrough is that they consume almost the same energy as ours, about 1.23 femtojoules. "Now they "only" need to reduce the thickness of the nanowires to one tenth. At that point we will be much closer to a biological computer or a digital brain". This is the kind of news that instead of enlightening us, leads us away from true knowledge. But to believe that the brain is connections, cell to cell makes no sense. And that the digital brain is a happy witticism. And it seems that this gentleman has not delved too deeply into what a synapse is, electrical, or chemical, or lateral connections.
In one cubic millimetre of the brain, there are about 100,000 neurons connected by 1 billion connections that allow them to communicate by exchanging chemicals, ions, and other substances that are the cause of their activity. Are you referring to this real brain?
The brain weighs one kilo four hundred grams. The dendrites: extensions of each neuron to receive information and send it to the body of the neuron, when added together, give us a figure of 70 with 70 zeros. Not to mention the fact that these connections can change, interchange in seconds, increase or decrease in size, disappear, become stronger or weaker. They are generally not fixed, nor stable. Something that this laboratory does not seem to take into account.
For this immensity to function, more than a hundred neurotransmitters and twice as many other substances from the complex metabolism of a whole body are needed, to which must be added the digestive brain and the ten million sensors scattered throughout our organism that send information to this organising centre we call the brain, as well as the bacteria that make up the intestinal macrobiota, thousands of proteins that act as enzymes, signals, structural support and many other functions. The brain receives nutrients, oxygen from the blood, and a 600-kilometre network of blood vessels.
This brain involves insulin, which is an important neuromodulator that contributes to neurobiological processes, such as cellular, biochemical and molecular functions, but which is manufactured outside the brain in the pancreas as we know.
Insulin plays a major role in synaptic plasticity, mood, learning: it exerts a neuroprotective function, in the birth of new connections, for the survival of circuits, even as a neurotransmitter.
Insulin from the pancreas plays a major role in cognitive processes, attention, executive functions, learning and memory.
They are outrageously simplifying what the brain-body is, as you have just seen. They have to explain to us where they are going to install a pancreas to supply insulin to this biological brain that they are going to make for us.
(Insulin, aging, and the brain: mechanisms and implications. Abimbola A. Akintola and Diana van Heems Department of Gerontology and geriatrics, Leiden University Medical center, leiden, Nethederlands)
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis