Groundbreaking Discoveries About Human Brain and Neuronal Complexity

so in the last few months there's been a tremendous amount of research and various discoveries in regards to the human brain so many discoveries as a matter of fact that I guess I'm going to have to divide this video into several parts and in this first part we're going to discuss recent announcements and recent discoveries coming out of Nemo the Neuroscience multiomic data archive essentially representing the largest collection of a lot of different data or more like huge amounts of data in regards to the human brain and extremely recently at least 24 different papers were published using all of this data in a process reviewing some of the strangest things about the human brain we've ever discovered also creating the largest human brain Atlas ever specifically focusing on discovering different types of brain cells and what they possibly do inside our brain here are some of the images of some of them but these 24 papers represent the first ever whole human brain Atlas focusing on individual cell types and molecular interaction with the rest of the cells and what's absolutely insane here is that the scientists identified over 3,000 different types of cells inside our brains all of them responsible for different types of functions and most of them unique to specific areas of the brain and so we don't just have neurons and support cells like gleo cells we actually have 3,000 or more than 3,000 different cells already identified inside the brain would this also be in the first collaboration trying to focus on differences between human and non-human brains with the emphasis being molecular interaction not just the structure and so there's definitely been some incredible discoveries in just the last few months and so hello INF full person this is Anton let's discuss our brain let's find out what was discovered at least to some extent because there's just a lot of stuff discovered here and talk talk about sound implications first though what exactly was this collaboration it started in 2017 and it basically focused on five main themes trying to create the overall atlas of the brain comparing this to various brains like monkey brains also comparing this to non- primates like mice trying to figure out how various cells develop but then specifically focusing on individual cells depending on the structure of the brain and because we know the brain contains at least 86 billion cells with at least as many support cells this was obviously no easy task in terms of the actual number that's just a little bit less than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy yeah that's a lot of cells and not surprisingly many of these cells turn out to be very different but what was surprising was the location of the complexity turns out that the parts of the brain we normally refer to as more complex so basically cortex where the thinking happens were really not that complex in terms of the actual cell structure and the most complexity was the discovered in the older deeper brain with the most complex of the mole being the brain stem an extremely understudied structure that connects the brain with the spinal cord and though it only makes up about 2 and 1 half% of the total brain weight it does have a lot of different functions it's responsible for it regulates the heart the breathing the sleep cycle and also serves as a kind of a interconnection between the brain and the rest of the body and so this tiny structure turned out to be the most complex when it comes to the actual cells present inside the brain in comparison our visual cortex the part of the brain we use for seeing is way more specialized and much more distinct compared to other structures it's even more specialized than in other animals for example mice and that's probably because humans and a lot of other Pates mostly rely on Vision to navigate the world despite of this though there are a lot of cells in this case that seem to be specialized and seem to be extremely specific in order to help us visually understand the world around us but one big question here is of course how does this actually compare from person to person are there a lot of individual differences and turns out that there definitely are every individual seems to have a proportion of certain cells different from another person and more specifically the genes switched on in various cells to control them seems to be different from person to person as well and so even on cellular and genetic level individual human brains are totally unique and since we're talking about 86 billion cells in this case yeah we're definitely individual snowflakes but in terms of the overall structure and architecture we don't just share it across the species we even share brain structures with various evolutionary causin and so in terms of the actual physical structure the human brain does appear somewhat similar to for example a chimp but it starts to become extremely different when it comes to genes controlling the connections between neurons and the formations of various circuits inside the brain here Things become extremely different because the human brain uses different genes to create these circuits in slightly different ways compared to everyone else and more interestingly even the exactly same gene in the same type of a cell can have an entirely different effect in a different part of the brain so basically you require different genes different types of neurons in different parts of the brain adding to the already complex interaction and one the main reasons for this types of research is to of course try to understand various types of disorders we humans experience in our brains and it turns out that a lot of human brain disorders are basically unique to humans they don't occur in any other animals including our cousins primates and so studying these cells and trying to understand them is extremely important and even in these first papers there's already been a link discovered between various types of brain cells and a lot of different neuros psychiatric disorders things like depression schizophrenia and bipolar disorder one of the studies for example focus on what's known as microa you can see these cells marked in green they're no long responsible for cleaning everything and for removing damaged cells but turns out that certain genetic components seem to act on these cells dramatically increasing the risk of things like Alzheimer's to some extent suggesting that the basis for many psychiatric disorders could be entirely genetic and molecular in nature but also implying that it's super complex way more complex than anyone ever thought another Finding was about this unusual L discovered by accident it's now referred to as Slim subarid lymphatic like membrane that basically appears as a kind of a barrier potentially serving as part of the immune system protecting the brain but because the brain itself does not have an actual immune response unlike the rest of the body in this case it has what's known as immune privilege a part of the body that doesn't produce immune response so for example things like ice in this case by discovering this unusual layer with several different immune cells such as myoid cells and macras in it suggest that this organ seems to basically watch the brain by controlling the flow of cerebros spinal fluid I guess a kind of a sewage control with liquid going in and out of the brain and so by transporting and removing the waist from the brain it also supports the immune defense preventing anything dangerous from getting inside the brain and so the discovery of this unusual layer relatively recently was definitely quite surprising as well but helps us understand a little bit more about the brain and how it maintains its Health there was also an intriguing Discovery in regards to what's known as axon fibers in general we know that all animals will contain these axons which are responsible for carrying electrical impulses and previously were always believed to be a kind of a branch like formation that forms from inside the neuronal cell but this new study discovered something entirely different first of all it turns out that they actually also originate from dandrites a slightly different branch that you see right there they are very often responsible for connecting neurons together it wasn't previously thought to be possible but turns out that it is but that's not a big Discovery here the big Discovery came from studying this in a lot of different animals and turns out that these unusual axon carrying dandrites or basically axons that were forming not from neuronal cells but from dandr connections are much more common in non primates like cats and pigs which by itself is a very interesting and somewhat unusual discovery that is somewhat difficult to explain it basically means that in for example humans we're most likely to have impulses and signals come directly from neurons via axons toward another cell but in for example cats or pigs this can also happen from dandrites without the use of neurons and because neurons are normally a kind of a gatekeeper when it comes to deciding which signals get past p and which don't and these dandr carrying axons seem to have the ability to kind of ignore the neuron basically pass the signal anyway it suggests that the signals in brains of other animals are passed around in a somewhat different way with the additional Discovery in this case also suggesting that the animal domestication did not affect the animal brains at all both pigs which are domesticated and bores which are wild seem to have exactly the same structure when it comes to axons and so that's one of the differences with this covered about human brain versus non-human brain but exactly what it means yet is still unknown another Discovery comes from something else it comes from the study of the shape of the brain and how it affects the skull itself in this case studying individual brain cavities in order to get approximation of the brain shape and so by looking at changes in the shape of the brain as the animal grows up so basically as the head itself changes in shape with time scientists discovered that animals are like apes so chimps and gorillas seem to have very similar integration between various brain Parts compared to humans at least until they reach Adolescence in other words their brain seems to mature in a similar way and seems to grow in a similar way for the first few years of their life but it seems to change dramatically once they become adults the brain growth sort of solidifies and various brain Parts no longer change their integration basically stopping their advancement and reaching a kind of a static State I guess for the lack of better words they kind of sto learning turns out though in Homo sapiens which is us and our extin cousins and under TOS things are very different our brain seems to never grow up it seems to experience continuous integration even into adulthood with the brain shape and the skull shape changing even decades into human or neandertal life which of course implies that we don't just learn until we become adolescent like chimps our brain seems to to continuously learn and evolve even past adulthood which shouldn't really come as a surprise because I mean you're watching this video and you're learning right now and most of you are very likely adults at least according to my YouTube statistics but what is surprising is that that's not the same for chimps they seem to stop the learning process pretty early on they obviously still learn a little bit just not as dramatically as we do and so this actually suggests that it's not that the larger brain that seems to Define intelligence it's really this overall integration inside the brain that seems to continue for a very long time and more importantly it also implies that our cousins NE undertales were extremely similar to us not some brutes that didn't know what they were doing they were extremely intelligent there's actually a lot of evidence about this and you can learn more about this in some of the previous videos but this is of course just one of many things that make us human and this is just a study based on CT scans of various skulls in order to understand how the skull and the Brain evolves as the species grows into adulthood we're going to actually discuss a lot of these discoveries separately in a video involving genetics and molecular studies that basically help us understand why humans are human if you don't want to miss that video make sure to subscribe but there was one more Discovery from a few months ago that once again highlights how human brain seems to be different from other animals and once again it doesn't necessarily make sense this was a study based on Hippocampus which usually plays a role in memory but also seems to play a role in visual imagination and our ability to construct mental images it also plays a role in navigation usually by helping us form mental imagery and by connecting the visual cortex with various parts of the brain that make decisions and turns out that once again it seems to be different in humans different from not just other animals but even from primates animals like chimps and gorillas for some reason human hippocampus has a much smaller connection between the front Al area of the brain where we do most of the thinking and much greater connections with the visual areas in other words even though we kind of expect our complex human brains to have more connections between the memory Center and the part of the brain where we do the thinking so the prefrontal cortex in reality the connections seem to be most prominent with the visual areas and that's probably because of some kind of a human specific memory that relates to visualization imagining things and visual cortex which to some extent might potentially finally explain why humans compared to other animals are so creative I mean the idea of art itself our ability to paint to create a lot of different imagery to create sculptures potentially comes from this very small but very important difference discovered only in humans but when it comes to the idea of memory formation it's still super super complex for us to understand even recently in one of the studies I mentioned previously and the one that you can obviously find in a description scientists once again discovered a new type of a brain cell that they now call glutamatergic asite it seems to be not really a neuron not really an asite something entirely different but something that seems to play a role in active memory formation because when they disrupted these cells in mice those mice started to have major memory problems but even the regular asra size the cells that you see presented in Green in this image which were always believed to be more or less passive and B Al responsible for the physical protection of various cells turn out to be a lot more active than anyone believed they actively respond to various signals and seem to be directly responsible for helping the brain recover from various types of stress they do so through a very complex chemical signaling system that was just discovered in one of these papers and so all of this of course suggests that our brain is ridiculously complex way more complex than we even thought a few years ago even compared to the previous video from I think two years ago that you can find in your description and a lot of these discoveries seem to be directly unique to humans which of course is the big question here so what exactly makes us so unique and what makes human intelligence so different from anything else on the planet and we'll be discussing all of that in the next part that's going to feature a lot of other papers from the last few months there's been a tremendous amount of discoveries that I just can't cover in a single video a lot of these discoveries are in regards to different cells that we never me existed some of them are about genetics only in humans and some of them are in regards to how the brain develops over time and so we definitely discuss this in the future in the video that's going to be coming out possibly in the next few weeks although here I guess I also have to mention the limitations from these studies so far most of this has been done by using tissue from various donors people who passed away or possibly tissues donated as a result of a surgery such as for example a brain surgery involving epilepsy and so in that sense it may still not necessarily represent a living healthy human brain however because many of these studies were done using RNA analysis and by using various genetic switches for the most part the discoveries seem to be more or less accurate but it's still important to mention these limitations anyway we'll talk more about this in the next video so yeah thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who with space and Sciences come back Tom more to learn something else support this channel patreon by joing Channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find any description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always [Music] [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 545,869

Keywords: neuron map, brain map, brain, human brain, neurons, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, brain vs universe, brain cell vs the universe, brain structure, consciousness, neuronal network, neural net, flow of information, axons, web, brain and universe, neuron discovery, biology, human neurons, memory, engram, memory formation, google brain map, connectomics, perceptron, arc gene, arc protein, capsid, campana cell, arhgap11b

Id: 24AsqE_eko0

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023