Eli5: What are the electrical impulses in the brain?
In: Biology
Those are your thoughts. Rather, a series of electrical pulses and the routes they take are your thoughts and memories.
A neuron is basically like a long wire and it can quickly send a current through itself. When it reaches the end, it send a chemical (neurotransmitter) across a small gap where it can meet the next neuron and instruct it to send its own electrical impulse.
Repeat this billions of times and you have a brain going.
the electrical impulses are the nerves in your brain rapidly releasing a build up of electrolyte ions (mainly sodium, potassium, and chloride). Yknow how when you dissolve salt (NaCl) in water you get Na+ (positively charged) and Cl- (Negatively charged) floating around on their own?
Its the same deal in your neurons (tho add in Potassium too, K+)
You neurons have these special pumps in their cell membranes that move a bunch of positive ions into the cells but keep the negative ions out. Then when it is time for the neuron to fire it “opens the gates” and let’s these electrically charged ions rush out. Which starts a chain reaction down one of the “arms” of the neuron to the next neuron, eventually causing that neuron to go off.
Your brain is made of neurons and each one can communicate to one or multiple other neurons by releasing some chemicals that causes a small charge to flow down them. Some elements like Sodium are positively charged while others are negatively charged. Positive and negative are attracted to each other to reach a neutral balance. Your brain and neurons have ways to use this property to cause a big chain of ions to flow, because one will want to flow towards the other. When ions flow it is measurable as electricity. These charges will flow down the neuron and at the end cause the neuron to release chemicals that can potentially cause a second neuron to do the same thing.
While not your initial question based on your comments I also wanted to add. Your brain is sorta like a computer with binary in 1 and 0s. Each neuron will either make an electrical charge (1) or it won’t (0). By themselves it may not have much order but when you take into account that your brain has over 100 billion neurons and many are structured in special ways attached to specific parts of the body you can start to see that your different parts of your brain and nervous system are like the different systems in a PC
Now your brain is definitely more complex than any current computer switch system, after all sometimes these neurons will change shape, get signals from many other neurons, or be affected by other chemicals, but the concept at the end is that each signal is just a small cog among billions of others.
Latest Answers