When a cosmic ray strikes a memory chip it can cause a bit flip or memory error can the same event effect electrical activity in the brain?
In: Biology
Well for one, computers are very different than human brains. All you need to do to mess up a memory chip in induce energy to change the electrical charge in several transistors.
While we still don’t understand the brain, I assume it’s a lot more complicated.
For example of the difference: rubbing large magnets on your computer will destroy the memory, but they won’t destroy your brain.
Cosmic rays affecting computer memory on earth is largely theoretical. Most don’t make it through the atmosphere, and the ones that do would have to hit a RAM chip in just the right way in order to flip a bit, basically winning the lottery. Even then, computers usually have error correction so it would know something happened and treat it as an error condition.
The human brain is so redundant and holistic and messy, a cosmic ray would have less affect. Individual neurons can *die* without having a profound impact, and misfires happen all the time.
Microwaves, cosmic rays, radio waves, light – all these are electromagnetic waves. They interact with metals by creating electricity and magnetism in them (this is how a radio antenna can “pick up” a signal – the signal (radio wave) creates corresponding electricity in the antenna metal).
EM waves cause memory or electronics errors because they cause uncontrolled electricity in the (metal wires in the) circuits. Your brain doesn’t have metal wires inside, so it’s not affected. But, like the others have said, strong enough radiation (gamma rays, cosmic rays) can damage your cells, including your brain cells, and cause cancers or radiation sickness.
A transistor represents a single 1 or 0. In the newest chips, a transistor is only ~40 atoms wide.
Neurons in our brains can be as large as 0.1mm – ~5000 times bigger than that transistor – and represent *nothing* on their own. Some parts of the brain deal with specific sensations or abilities (like speech), but thoughts and memories are patterns that are massively distributed throughout the brain. Changing the output of any one neuron – which likely can’t even happen, due to the size of a neuron versus the size of a subatomic particle – would only alter that neuron’s microscopic contribution to a huge distributed process. This would not be enough to alter anything in the brain.
In my university physics lab we had a radioactive source, just sitting on the counter, surrounded by lead blocks. On the day when half of the class was doing a lab about half-lives, each student would pull one of the bricks out, insert some material into the space for a few seconds, and then put the brick back. I was sitting on the other side of the room, and kept seeing moving dots in my vision. When I noticed they were moving the lead blocks, it made sense: ‘cosmic rays’ hitting your retina make you see flashes of light. But that is what the retina *does*: it takes packets of incoming energy, and turns them into signals that flow back into the brain. The neurons in the brain for the most part have no similar simple task; hitting one of them – or even a thousand of them – wouldn’t be enough to change anything enough for you to notice.
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