20240128 : Communication protocol...

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Some days back, I had written about why i feel the muscles have strands and each of them being connected to the brain separately... (https://mindofmystrokedbrain.blogspot.com/2024/01/20240124-balancing-equations.html)

Come to think about it, I am guessing that there are such connections and strands for not just muscles but every part of the body - bones, ligaments, tissues, skin and every organ we have.

Thinking about it, in orders of magnitude, it probably is in hundreds of thousands at least (maybe even Millions).

Here is the most interesting thing. All of them are connected to the brain through the spinal cord.

The spinal cord is about 1cm in diameter. Not only that, not exactly circular in cross section but it is hollow like a very long and thin cylinder. The centre of the spinal cord is filled with spinal fluid. It is not circular, but it's given that it cannot be very big with that cross section area. 

What follows is the engineer in me speaking....

Well, the hundreds of thousands of nerves I mentioned earlier, there is no 1-to-1 dedicated connection. they can't fit into this cross section obviously to have a 1-to-1 dedicated line to the brain. What i understand is there are only 31 pairs of nerves that comes from the brain which the spinal cord branches out - 1 pair at each vertebral segment .

Now, the engineer in me wonders how the brain communicates with every end of every branch of the nerve - hundreds of thousands of them (maybe even more).

The electrical/ electronics person in me crudely says maybe it is doing some sort of multiplexing .

The computer person in me crudely says it is using some sort of biological addressing ( crudely put - like the IP address mechanism on the internet)

That's about all my small mind can come up with 🤷🏾‍♂️

Most places I have tried to find out, just says the neurons and their synapses do this. But I have struggled to find anything that explains how that volume and speed of information is squeezed and managed in that cross section. 

I can't say I have done the most comprehensive search, but I have looked a bit and everywhere it's the same thing - that it is a combination of electric signals and neuro transmitters using neurons to transmit information.

I even tried AI (ChatGPT). In it's very authoritative and confident manner with original 100% plagiarised content, it told me the same thing. 

But it does this somehow. I am sure that cross section is even more reduced in my case (at the junction where the brain stem narrows down and becomes the spinal cord). Yet, it is doing what it can manage to keep me going..

So, I am very thirsty to quench this thirst - driven by my curiosity regarding this. If any of you are aware of any literature demystifying it, please point me in that direction...


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