Free Will: Round worm experiment (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 14, 2015, 17:06 (3542 days ago) @ David Turell

Study covers three neurons related to sensing food. What the authors cannot tell is whether the worm is hungry at the time of the trial, just as they note in humans, hungry or not?-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150313110402.htm-"Even worms have free will. If offered a delicious smell, for example, a roundworm will usually stop its wandering to investigate the source, but sometimes it won't. Just as with humans, the same stimulus does not always provoke the same response, even from the same individual. New research at Rockefeller University, published online in Cell, offers a new neurological explanation for this variability, derived by studying a simple three-cell network within the roundworm brain.-"The human brain has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, or connections, among them. The brain of the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, by comparison, has 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses. So while the worm's brain cannot replicate the complexity of the human brain, scientists can use it to address tricky neurological questions that would be nearly impossible to broach in our own brains.-"Worms spend their time wandering, looking for decomposing matter to eat. And when they smell it, they usually stop making random turns and travel straight toward the source. This change in behavior is initially triggered by a sensory neuron that perceives the smell and feeds that information to the network the researchers studied. As the worms pick up the alluring fruity smell of isoamyl alcohol, the neurons in the network transition into a low activity state that allows them to approach the odor. But sometimes the neurons remain highly active, and the worm continues to wander around -- even though its sensory neuron has detected the odor.-"Scaled up to account for the more nuanced behaviors of humans, the research may suggest ways in which our brains process competing motivations. "For humans, a hungry state might lead to you walk across the street to a delicious smelling restaurant. However, a competing aversion to the cold might lead you to stay indoors," he says."