Introducing the brain: self-organization while developing (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 21, 2024, 19:11 (186 days ago) @ David Turell

New research into brain development:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-05-team-cortex-abilities-neural.html

"Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies investigated how highly organized patterns of neural activity emerge during development. They found the cortex of the brain can transform unorganized inputs into highly organized patterns of activity—demonstrating self-organization.

"'What makes this transformation so important is that it appears to occur entirely within the cortex itself, indicating that the brain is able to organize its own function during development," said Gordon Smith, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the U of M Medical School.

"'This suggests that any perturbations to these small-scale interactions can dramatically change the function of the brain, which may impact sensory perception and possibly contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders like autism."

"In a self-organizing system, small-scale interactions combine to generate large-scale organization. By closely combining theory and experiment, the research team was able to show that mathematical rules similar to those found to govern the patterns in a broad range of living and non-living systems, such as the spots on certain fish and the spacing of sand dunes, also guide the development of the brain.

"'Our results suggest that neural activity patterns in the early cortex arise dynamically through feedback loops that involve a balance between local activation and lateral suppression, confirming a theoretical hypothesis of brain development dating back decades," said Matthias Kaschube, Ph.D., professor at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and co-investigator of the study. (my bold)

"'By utilizing cutting-edge optical techniques, these experiments allowed us to test a long-held scientific theory and show that the brain organizes its own activity during early development," said Dr. Smith, who is also a member of the Medical Discovery Team on Optical Imaging and Brain Science.

"Ongoing research is exploring how alterations in these self-organized neural activity patterns early in development impact sensory perception later in development."

Comment: note my bold. Feedback loops are an essential part of how living tissue controls all processes. This degree of self-editing is how complexification is part of the brain processes and functions. It is the same process, even after the brain is fully developed.