eli5: How do neurons work, and how do they work together to make the human mind?
In: Biology
They take in chemical signals from what they float in and electrical signals from other neurons to generate more electrical signals. Generating a signal is called “firing”.
For example serotonin is psychoactive because it’s one of the chemicals that is in the fluid around neurons and affects how the next neurons fire. Neurons fire really fast in large numbers, to the point that you can actually listen to them hum if you have the right tools.
As for how these waves of electrical signals create the mind, that’s not fully understood.
Most of what we know about how neurons affect the mind is from analysis of what happens in extreme situations where areas of neurons are destroyed. Sometimes this is intentional, like when a surgeon cuts the corpus callosum to prevent extremely frequent seizures that signal across it. Sometimes this is accidental, like when someone gets a traumatic brain injury like a gunshot and survives.
From this analysis we’ve generally shown that certain areas of the brain are responsible for certain types of processing, though the individual affected isn’t necessarily aware of it. If certain areas get damaged, for example, a person can lose most of their language processing functions (reading, speaking, understanding spoken words); however the person might not be aware of the loss.
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