#31 Mark Humphries - Most Neurons in Our Brain are Silent

Out of the 90 billion neurons in your brain, how many are active right now?

Mark Humphries is the Chair in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Nottingham. His group interrogates how the joint activity of many neurons encodes the past, present, and future in order to guide behavior.

He’s recently authored a book called “The Spike”, which details what really happens in our brain from an information flow perspective. In this podcast, I’m going to ask Mark how information flows inside the brain and some of the surprising discoveries made in neuroscience in recent years.

== What we talk about ==
0:00 - Introduction
1:11 - How did you get interested in studying the brain from a computational perspective?
4:09 - How is cognitive modeling different from computational neuroscience? Do they overlap?
6:44 - What is a spike? And how and why did it evolve as a mode of communication between neurons?
13:57 - How does a neuron integrate thousands of incoming inputs?
21:31 - What is your take on the existence of so many connections in the brain even though most of them are silent?
26:26 - What are dark neurons?
32:37 - What is the grandmother neuron (a.k.a. Jennifer Aniston neuron)? And how did it become popular?
42:44 - Is it possible for a brain to be comprised of a single neuron?
44:59 - How many hops in the brain does it take for the information to go from one part to another in the human body?
48:21 - Why is there spontaneous activity in the brain? How is it generated?
57:01 - What are neurons doing when we are in deep sleep?
58:18 - How much do you rely on these grand unified theories of the brain?
1:06:24 - What is consciousness? Your take on how the brain generates the subjective experience we are having?