https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00696-y
https://www.world-wide.org/cosyne-22/what-snow-neural-avalanche-069b867c/ [from https://archive.ph/1oB6G ]
- To wrap up this section on weird stuff, Chaitanya Chintaluri gave a poster presentation on an idea so wild that I think it’ll either be a Science paper or forever-bioRxiv (no disrespect at all, and I told him this on the spot). If you’ve ever worked with in-vitro cultures, or are familiar with fetal neurodevelopment, you’ll likely have encountered the fact that networks entirely isolated from inputs often still have (quite large) network activations, i.e., network bursts or “avalanches”. It’s a strange and very robust phenomenon, and you see this anywhere from primary cultures, stem cell-derived planar or spherical networks, as well as slices. On one hand, it’s not that crazy to imagine that a couple of neurons might spontaneously fire, and when the connectivity is right, the small handful would trigger a large network response until exhaustion, and the cycle repeats itself after some neuronal or synaptic adaptation time. On the other hand, you can ask a simple yet perplexing question: why do these neurons want to fire, especially considering the fact that action potentials are quite energetically costly? Chai’s proposal was that getting rid of energy, specifically in the form of excess ATP, is precisely the reason why neurons want to fire, because accumulation of ATP in the neuronal mitochondrial is apparently toxic. There are a lot more details in the biology that he’s worked out, and heavy-duty stuff like free radicals, Reactive Oxygen Species, etc. etc., and they built a computational model to reproduce this effect. I have no idea if this will turn out to be true, but it goes along with my pet conspiracy theory that action potentials are not for communicating with other neurons, but rather stems from a neuron’s intrinsic and uncontrollable urge to seek relief from some kind of electrochemical pressure state.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306525120
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.28.466310v2.full
^Michael Forrest is REALLY proud of this paper to a huge extent which matters
[but also, it’s more biophysically grounded than most longevity papers
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Have you heard any news on Michael’s startup company? Has he gotten any more funding?
