Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.

Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?

What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.

>> ^L0cky:
Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.
Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?
What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.


@L0cky - I was worried the jargon would be a bit too much. The video definitely assumes knowledge of certain physiology concepts. I'd be happy to explain as much of that as you like. But I'm not sure if you're asking about the basic biology, or something more metaphysical in the sense of how conscious thought is transformed into patterns of neural activation.

As for the speed of the process, keep in mind that this is at a molecular scale. This is all happening at the speed of very tightly coordinated chemical reactions.

This video describes the very similar process at the synaptic junctions between neurons, and may explain a detail or two more clearly, if less completely.

Whats to know, things are released, things bind, things react actions happen. etc. whooopy doo not that hard.

>> ^L0cky:

Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.
Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?
What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.


Essentially you have a branching network of fibers (dendrites) that join together at the neuron (brain cell) body. If enough of these dendrites stimulate the neuron body then the neuron sends the action potential, if there is not enough stimulation, then no action potential is sent. So while a neuron can be activated in a variety of ways (e.g dendrites coming from various areas of the brain) there is only one outcome - either the action potential is sent or it isn't.

Movement is a lot more interesting than just thought - action potential - movement, however. This is because parts of our brain can store movement patterns, so many of our learned movements (e.g. dancing) just need a trigger and then some movement pattern is initiated at a sub-conscious level - the cerebellum is a part of the brain that helps with this.

@jonny also sifted this.
>> ^L0cky:

Upvoted, but to be honest they could have been making all that up for all I know.
Also I'm surprised by the amount of steps and chemical reactions considering the response time between thinking and doing. Did anyone share my naive imagining of magical electricity shooting from my brain and contracting my muscles?
What I'd find interesting is learning how nerve impulses (also known as action potentials!) form, or begin. How they get from or are cued from this seemingly virtual world of my thoughts into actual things that do stuff to my body.

>> ^berticus:
jonny also sifted this.

@berticus really doesn't like that video. I'm not terribly fond of it by itself either, but it's part of a series that make sense if you watch all of them.

it's not bad! i'm just sure there's gotta be some better ones.. (not that i have a fucking clue where they are, so i will shutup and disappear now)

Three times I've started to write a comment giving some more detail of neuron activation, and each time I've had to stop myself from creating a wall of text. Any detail of the cellular mechanism of neural activation requires an explanation of a fair bit of basic cell biology. I think instead I'll create a talk post or two describing as much of the cellular process of neuron signaling as I can.