what do neurons do? Just read that I have 150 billion of them?
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They enable you to think and have memories and interpret the world around you, they are your brain and more.
Your neurons are you. Without them, you’re just a sack of meat. Your brain, which is what makes you a sentient and sapient organism with thoughts and feelings and memories, is made of neurons. The cells in your body that detect senses (smell, touch, taste, sight, temperature, pain…etc) and send those signals to your brain are neurons. The cells that control your muscle movements are neurons.
Neurons are specialized cells in your body. They make up your nervous system — your nerves and brain. They’re just cells, like muscle cells or fat cells.
Each one has a bunch of tentacle-like legs that connect to other neurons so that signals can be sent along these long chains and webs of neurons.
The nerves that can sense heat in your fingertip will send a certain signal through nerves in your hand and arm up to your brain where it’s processed into the sensation of heat. Your brain can send signals the other direction, telling your muscles to contract so you can move.
Neurons in your brain form an incredibly complex web of connections. There might be 100 billion neurons in your brain, but there are 100 trillion connections between them.
Each neuron passes on an incoming signal in a slightly different way, and is connected to a specific set of other neurons that also alter signals in their own ways.
This all adds up to powerful processing capabilities. The image your eye sees gets passed to different parts of the brain. One part of it is built to pick out things that look like faces, for example.
It’s hard to ELI5 how that works, but we have built computer programs that mimic this system. Individual neurons are very simple, but the complex way they are connected allows us to turn the raw input of our senses into simple categories: that’s a face, that’s a dog, this cup is hot, etc. When you have billions of them that have evolved to be connected in ways that process sensory input, you can navigate the world we evolved in.
We probably also think using our neurons.
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