Roughly one decade ago chaos theory was all the rage. You know, the butterfly in Africa causing a hurricane to hit Finland and all that.
Oops. Scratch that. Could never happen. The hurricane might hit Florida.
Anyway, the point is that small perturbations can precipitate and/or influence large/complex systems. Like the weather.
Thanks to new research, it now seems our inner “brain storms” can likewise be derailed by butterflies. So to speak. In ‘Butterfly Effect’ in the Brain Makes the Brain Intrinsically Unreliable I learned . . .
[A]ccording to new research by UCL scientists published June 30 in the journal Nature, the brain is intrinsically unreliable.
Damn. My brain is unreliable?! Is that why I’m always exaggerating things?!
Here’s the actual, less glorious, science:
The perturbation was a single extra ‘spike’, or nerve impulse, introduced to a single neuron in the brain of a rat. That single extra spike caused about thirty new extra spikes in nearby neurons in the brain, most of which caused another thirty extra spikes, and so on. This may not seem like much, given that the brain produces millions of spikes every second. However, the researchers estimated that eventually, that one extra spike affected millions of neurons in the brain. [emphasis mine]
Estimated that eventually. . . Indeed.
If you ask me, “brain unreliability” is a glass one one-millionth full. Maybe. At least until demonstrated otherwise.
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