The brain is a marvel of efficiency, honed over thousands of years of evolution, allowing it to adapt and evolve in a rapidly changing world. However, despite decades of research, the mystery of how the brain achieves this has still not been solved. Our new research, published in the journal Cell, shows how the neurons responsible for your childhood memories, thoughts and emotions coordinate their activity.
It is similar to an employee working in a high-performance business. The balance between individual skills and teamwork is the key to success, so how do you achieve the balance?
It turns out that the brain’s secret is surprisingly simple: Devote no more than half (and at least 40 percent) of each cell’s effort to individual tasks. Where should the remaining efforts be directed? For scalable teamwork. Here’s what’s interesting: We discovered exactly the same organizational structure in the brains of five animal species, from fruit flies and nematodes to zebras, mice and monkeys.
These species come from different branches of the tree of life, separated by over a billion years of evolution; This suggests that we may have discovered a fundamental principle of optimized information processing. It also offers powerful lessons for any complex system today.
Midfield is critical
Our discovery answers a long-standing debate about the brain: Do neurons act like star players (each highly specialized and efficient) or do they favor teamwork (keeping the entire system running even if some elements fail)?
It was difficult to answer this question. Until recently, neuroscience tools were limited to recording the activity of a few or a few million cells.
This would be like trying to understand a large company by interviewing a few employees or just getting the resume of a senior department. There was no critical middle.
However, thanks to advances in calcium imaging, we can now record signals from tens of thousands of cells simultaneously. Calcium imaging is a technique that allows you to observe neuronal activity in real time using fluorescent sensors that light up according to the calcium level in the cell.
By applying knowledge from my physics education to analyze large-scale data sets, we discovered that brain activity occurs according to a fractal hierarchy. Cells work together to form larger coordinated networks, creating an organization where each scale reflects those above and those below.
This framework provided an answer to the debate: The brain actually does this both that and the other. It combines individuality and teamwork and does it in a smart way. About half the effort is spent on “individual” performance as neurons cooperate in increasingly larger networks.
The brain can quickly adapt to changes
We performed computer simulations to test whether the structure of the brain has unique advantages and found that this fractal hierarchy optimizes the flow of information in the brain. This allows the brain to do something important: adapt to change. This allows the brain to function efficiently, perform tasks with minimal resources, maintain resilience, and maintain performance even when neurons fail.
Whether you’re navigating unfamiliar terrain or responding to an immediate threat, your brain processes and responds to new information quickly. Neurons constantly adjust their coordination, keeping the brain stable enough for deep thought yet agile enough to respond to new challenges.
The multi-scale organization we find allows different strategies or “neural codes” to operate at different scales. For example, we discovered that the movement of zebrafish depends on many neurons working in harmony. This durable design ensures smooth sailing even in rapidly changing conditions.
In contrast, a mouse’s vision adapts to the cellular scale, providing the precision needed to pick out small details in a scene. Here, if a few neurons miss important pieces of information, the entire perception can change; just like an optical illusion tricks your brain. Our findings show that this fractal coordination of neuronal activity occurred over a broad evolutionary span, from vertebrates whose last common ancestor lived 450 million years ago to invertebrates a billion years ago.
This suggests that the brain has evolved to balance efficiency and resilience, allowing it to optimize information processing and adapt to new behavioral demands. Evolutionary continuity suggests that we have discovered a fundamental principle of design.
Is it a fundamental principle?
These are exciting times when physics and neuroscience continue to interact to unravel the universal laws of the brain created by eons of natural selection. More studies will be needed to see how these principles might work in the human brain. Our findings also suggest something else: This simple rule of individual focus and scalable teamwork may not be just a brain solution. When elements are organized into multi-level networks, resources can be allocated efficiently and the system becomes fault tolerant.
The best companies work the same way; When a new problem arises, people can respond without waiting for a manager’s direction, so they can solve the problem while supporting the organization. This could be a universal principle for ensuring the stability and efficiency of complex systems. It looks like basketball legend Michael Jordan was right when he said, “Games are won with talent, championships are won with teamwork and intelligence.”
Source: Port Altele
