Lectures on the brain, part 1. The evolution of the human brain. The functions of the brain at each stage of its development

Greeting

Greetings to the whole community Habra. My name is Alexander Morozov. I am a practicing physician, worked as a therapist, currently specializing in radiation diagnosis (working in CT and MRI), I work in ultrasound diagnostics.

I run the blog Collector of the Future, in which I talk about different progressive bioengineering, medical and other breakthrough technologies through various activities. I will gradually introduce you to my projects.
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In a series of video lectures, I will talk about the human brain from its evolutionary development to the possibilities that neurocomputer interfaces promise to give us in the next decade, from macro-structure of parts of the cortex, to micro-structure of neurons and signaling neurotransmitters.

Without knowing the history of the evolutionary development of the brain, it will be difficult to understand the intentions of researchers who will improve the work of the main organ of our nervous system. Therefore, meet the first lecture: “Evolution of the brain”!

Decryption

Greetings to all. I am Alexander and I explain difficult, but interesting things in simple words.

And now we’ll just be discussing the most unusual and complex object that humanity knows. Let's talk about the brain. What it is, how it works, how it can already be improved and “repaired”. And, the most interesting, what methods of improving our brain are offered by well-known companies, researchers, geniuses, billionaires, playboys, philanthropists.

To understand how our brain works now, you need to look back a little. Years that way 600 million.

The coolest thing you could see at the time was a sponge. Aquatic multicellular animals. Without nerves. Without nerves you cannot move or think, process all sorts of information. They simply existed and waited for death.

But then some 20 million years passed and they appeared ... jellyfish! The first nervous system appeared - just a network of nerves. Now, when the jellyfish hit the stone, the whole body will know about it. The nervous network of jellyfish allowed them to gather important information about the world around us - where objects are, where predators are, where food is - and, as if through a large social network, information went to all parts of the body. There is already a quality life, not aimless ploping.

After another 30 million years, steeper creatures appeared. Flatworms. The flatworm found out that much more could have been done if someone in the nervous system was responsible for everything. A kind godfather of the nervous system appeared. It is located in the head of a flatworm and controls the entire nervous system of the body so that it transmits new information directly to it. Therefore, instead of organizing itself into a network form, the flatworm's nervous system collapsed into a central channel of nerves that sent information back and forth between the boss and everything else. The head nerve nodes of a flatworm and fill the rest.

The idea of ​​a boss in the nervous system was quickly picked up by other organisms, and soon on Earth thousands of species appeared with brains.

Time passed, and animals received complex and new bodies, so the brains became more and more entertaining. And 265 million years ago, creatures appeared, on the nervous system of which our brain is based. Moreover, their nervous system often controls our actions (but more on that later). Frogs. Or rather amphibians. Their brain was already capable of this kind of automatic analysis of actions.

The brain perfectly matched the impulses coming from the senses with the actions to be taken. He was fully responsible for the complex functions necessary for a living organism - breathing, heartbeat, digestion, excretion, and so on.

A little later, the mammals arrived. For the animal kingdom, life was already difficult. Yes, their hearts had to beat, and their lungs breathed, but the mammals wanted more than just to survive - they got complicated feelings, such as love, anger and fear.

Therefore, the mammals have a second boss, who began to work in tandem with the brain of reptiles and took care of all these new needs. So 225 million years ago, the world's first limbic system appeared, responsible for the senses.

Over the next 100 million years, the life of mammals became more and more complex and intense, and one day, 80 million years ago, an early version of the neocortex (a new part of the brain, which we know as the cortex) appeared. With the advent of primates, and then the big monkeys and the first hominids, strategic thinking begins to emerge.

The ideas of the new department turned out to be very useful; tools, hunting strategies, and cooperation with other hominids appeared.

Over the next several million years, the neocortex grew older and wiser, and his ideas constantly improved. He understood how to get rid of nudity. He understood how to control the fire. He learned to make spears.

But the coolest trick was thinking . He turned the head of each person into a small world-in-itself, making people the first animals that can comprehend complex thoughts, reason and come to decisions, make long-term plans.

And then, about 100,000 years ago, there was a breakthrough. People started talking. The human brain developed to the point when it began to understand that a set of sounds, such as a “stick,” was not a stick in itself , but it could be used as a symbol for a stick — a stick was meant by this sound.

Very soon, words appeared for all sorts of things, and by 50,000 BC, people were already communicating in a full-fledged, complex language.

Neocortex turned people into magicians. Not only did he make the human head a wonderful inner ocean of complex thoughts, his last breakthrough found a way to translate these thoughts into sounds and send them to vibrate through the air into the heads of other people who could decode these sounds and soak up their ideas in them . The human neocortex has been thinking about things for a long time - and now, finally, he had someone to discuss them with.

We can say that a neocortex party has gathered. Neocortexes began to share with each other everything that they could: stories from the past, formed opinions, plans for the future.

But the most useful was to share with fellow tribesmen everything that he himself had learned. If one person understood by trial and error that certain types of berries turn life for 48 hours into a nightmare, he could already use his tongue to tell about his difficult lesson in the life of the rest of his tribe. Tribal members can use language to pass this lesson to their children, and their children to their children. Instead of different people repeating the same mistake from time to time, one of them can say “do not eat these berries”, and since then his wisdom will pierce space and time, protecting everyone from unpleasant moments.

The same thing will happen when one person comes up with some new clever trick. For example, one extraordinarily intelligent hunter, who loves to watch the annual migration patterns of flocks of wild animals, can share the system he developed. find a way to make lighter and stronger copies that you can throw more accurately.

The language allows the best insights of the most intelligent people to be transmitted through the generations, accumulating into a small collection of knowledge of the tribe, consisting of the best ideas of their ancestors. Now, each new generation will receive this knowledge as a starting point for life, and it will lead them to even steeper discoveries based on the knowledge of their ancestors. The wisdom of the tribe will grow and spread.

Each generation can learn much more new when everyone speaks with each other, compare notes and combine their individual knowledge. And each generation can successfully transfer a high percentage of its knowledge to the next generation, so knowledge is better preserved over time.

Shared knowledge becomes like a great, collective collaboration between generations. Thanks to the language, innovation with a spear will pass through hundreds of changes over tens of thousands of years and become a bow and arrow.

Language gives a group of people a collective mind that far exceeds the individual human intellect and allows each person to benefit from the collective mind, as if he himself had invented it all.

You may think that we have deviated from the topic of the brain, but we need these aspects of the formation and functions of the language in order to understand the intentions of the researchers who want to pump our brain.

5-6 thousand years ago there was another giant breakthrough - a letter. And if a language allows people to send thoughts from one brain to another, writing allows them to place thoughts on physical objects. Next, the printing press made knowledge more accessible. We will no longer focus on the fact that Gutenberg did not invent such a machine, but simply slightly modified the invention of the Chinese, made a couple of centuries before him.

But still, it was a breakthrough! You no longer have to manually rewrite books! Although this job of putting metal letters on a tile, smearing it with ink and pressing this tile on a sheet of paper, with an output of 25 pages per hour now seems like hmm ... lag.

Anyway. Over the next centuries, printing technology improved rapidly, and the number of pages that a machine could print per hour by the beginning of the 19th century was already 2,400. Not bad.

However, this can not be compared with our time. Although, truthfully, paper generally goes out of fashion. Further more. Thoughts of one person could already reach millions of people. The era of mass communication has begun. And in the XX-XXI century, scientific discoveries sypyatsya, like a horn of plenty. So here. All this allowed all the wonders of technology that we know to appear. Nowadays, people invent things that would seem absurd science fiction to people of the last generation. But enough history, it's time to move on to something really interesting!

Next, we are waiting for knowledge about the structure and functioning of the brain, about the methods of studying it, about the existing neurocomputer interfaces, and about the future possibilities of the technical development of our brain.

For assistance in the design of the article a separate thanks to arielf