If there are no questions, I'd like to go ahead to jump in.

Feel free to ask questions as we move

on. So information processing that's really abstract term. Now you can get an idea for how
information flows by seeing that on the internet. What we know is information pass and back and
forth. We can actually conceptualize this. Now that is interesting when we hear of the word
internet you think of something that's vast seeing munition. But at the end of the day, we can
conceptualize how an information is transformed and definitely how it's stored. Let me give you
a context for what the brain does. So if we stick an electrode interact to something vert simple
over the course of a few hours, its going to turn over gigabytes of information. That's if you place
an electrode in a circumscribed area get general field reports. So gigabytes of information just in
that hour or two. So you begin to imagine there is no way to conceptualize how to achieve
informations if we record from every neuron of the brain lets say in the course of a few years
starting deveopment. You are talking about scales of information that you can't conceptualize.
That's information processing. Now if we try to give more little more definition to it, people will
point out that this general process, so we take information in, a lot of it, we are talking about
everything you are getting in an indivudal field from both sides. Your peripheral vision which are
going to do things that are slightly different than your vision, we are talking about sensory
information coming in, from instance someone is coming in and closing the door. That's sensory
information that is coming in, you are regulating on second by second bases. So you experience a
gust of wind coming in, you're primarily gonna be using your auditory system. Your attention
are diverted. With your selective attention how that sensory information comes in. At that point
you are thinking of experiencing before or haven't I. If you haven't you are going to maintain that
representation of the the experience in your memory. You are going to ask yourself well, why
haven't I seen it before? If you haven't seen it before, you are going to prioritize and remember it
to use this information later. So those visual pieces, those auditory pieces whether you are happy
at the time or sad, that is going to be bound and compressed, stored for later use. At some point
as everything is happening in real time you will decide what to do with the information, once you
realize you never seen like a purple giraffe, you are going to realize, that might be something you
might have to get away from. So that's a lot in a nutshell. With what a typical psychologist or
neurologist if you ask them, they would go into each one of these topics and break it down into
another hundred pieces. So we put the definition behind information processing but this is
something you all will get to know. The reason our brain does all this, is because the brain it has
one half the pieces of hardware supporting it. It got about 100 billion neurons that are connected
with one quadrillion synapses. Synapses is the term we used to describe connection one neuron
and another. That's even adding the process. Synapses are elastic and can change, you will learn
about it later. That quadrillion number easily explains it, 100 quadrillion larger scales. So this is
how we are going to process all that information. We have a lot of neurons and really
sophisticated things, and they have miniaturize compartments they can process information with.
So what I want to get at out of here, if anything else is that as we describe the biology of the
neurons, its going to become intuitive how some of the things we just talked about and how
indivudual neurons are micro. So just a brief background, some biology, as I alluded to neurons
are in computation with work forces in the nervous system. You only get them once, they are

really not replaceable, they'll die, we learn here and there that might not perfectly be the case but
for the most part there is a why when you get a head injury it's pretty serious because it's hard to
replace those guys. Whats interesting is about these neurons, yes they are susceptible to head
injuries, are they are pretty resilient, you are born with them and you die with same cells. Pretty
cool. As you might expect, cells that are processing, all these information they take in large
amounts of oxygen, very high performance cells in the body. So here are some general parts,
neuron in terms of its cellular composition, is not like other cells in the human body, it has areas
that has proteins, it has areas that traffice the proteins and so forth. Maybe the simplets part, is
the membrane, so neuron is contour and morphology is followed by membrance structure that
create barriers. So this membrane creates a barrier that there are intracellular compartments
compartment that is specifically regulated that are shared by other cells around it or other cells of
the body. Now membrane structures are also clastic, imagine membranes having to accomodate
movement. The next general organelle, is cytoplasm. It's basically substance that fills the cells.
Now you can think of it as liquid. The thing with cytoplasm is like a liquid that's always on the
cusp of forming glass, so the other organelles in the body are not fit structures, a lot of them
move through mitochondria. In order to regulate the velocity of that movement, the cytoplasm
can actually grow more matifiscus so there are areas of specification in ctyoplasm that we are
starting to uncover. Now I'm going to go over mitochondria real quick.The reality is you have
these organelles, that are like microorgans around a cell. The thing that you have to remember
about the endoplasmic reticulum is where the proteins and the other cells are produced. Golgi is
responsible for a lot of the trafficking that's going on. So if you see a question on the test that
ask what golgi does, the answer will be it traffic stuff. The thing about cytoskeleton is unlike
physical bones, it's contantly changing. It consumes 3, 4, or 5 basic shapes, pretty stable in the
adult. The nucleus is sort of a rigid structure in a way, don't want much going on, tampering the
information, the cell leaves to perform it's function. It got a very thick membrane of it's own. It
stores DNA and here's the interesting thing about it, those DNA molecules they're really elastic
despite it's rigidity structure, and relative rigidity of chromosome is sort of a macro structure of
the protein that keeps the DNA compressed. Realize that DNA is highly valuable and modified as
experienced as it gets. Now this is where we start to go into constant novel. From now on in
terms of proccessing information as two major aspects. It has dendrites receive information and
one axon that sends information. Lots of dendrites they integrate lots of information one to one
and they send that message one particular way. The function is sort of a structure here
information coming in and axon going out. We talked about those one quadrillion actions
between neurons and you might ask yourselves how does this happen? How do you have a cell
that accomodates thousands of connections. The way the neuron does it is it produces a massive
antennae. So it has major tree branch like a structure that come off its body and all of that are
smaller branches that are oriented in directions. Whats not really shown here is it's expansive. So
the dendrites in a nutshell receive signals from neurons and they take all of that information and
they send it to the cell module. And what you are going to end up hearing is that not all the
information that a dendrite receives is equal. The information coming in from a cell body is more
important than the information coming out, it has to do with what happens during that signal

losses. We'll get into that. Keep in mind that dendrites are a sort of a central key way of how the
neuron function it's job. So just keeps in mind that the dendrites changes depending on what part
of brain. Now when the cell chooses to fire after receiving a bunch of information from
dendrites, it starts a chain reaction where it iself is going to fire, where all that information it all
boils down to whether that neuron fires or not the response of the information. That decision
point where it fires is called the axon peller. Its a structure of the order to axon and cell module.
The axon receives information that the neuron is firing, pretty narrow structure. It can expand a
long way like 3-4 feet like the one where it serves the spinal cord, it depends. Now an axon you
have a singular axon body, what happens is that when it fires they can send this message to a lot
of tributaries. One axon can affect a lot of neuron downstream. if you look at neurons in the brain
some of them have collaterals. From what right now we will go into detail about this probably
tomorrow. Just remember the axon is part of the neuron that sends information and sends in a
particular way and that information is send through a firing pulse. Whats interesting about the
brain is that you have these neurons that goes through a heck lot of processing and it can't do it
alone. The couple other kinds of cells in the brain that support neuron function . One of those
group is called the astrocytes. What astrocytes do, is to physically and chemically enact neurons
to blood supply. Now neurons have no way of storing information, its not like a bunch of stuff
sitting around chopped up. It's through the astrocytes sthat we are able to maintain a constant
flow of energy. Whats interesting about the astrocytes it can constantly change its shape in the
blood vessels that neurons can receive more nutrients, more energy, more oxygen, where it needs
contacts compress the cardiovascular if the neuron is acting. Isn't the astrocytes regulate the
glucose? Say that one more time? Isn't the astrocytes regulate the glucose movement... Yes... that
gets complicated...Energy and metabolisms are associated with how the neurons fire. That is very
acceptable. So this is just a recap of the conversation we just had. After that knowing that
astrocytes are conduits of which the energy get into the neurons they also are sort of bionic
generators. When neuron fires what we are going to learn is that it has to spit out pottasium
mines. So when you think astrocytes think of energy supply, pottassium iron buffer. If that wern't
enough, we're beginning to learn that astrocytes have walls that protects them so they have
specialize appendages that make contact with blood, then maybe with other stuff. This is I really
like this picture, we'll learn the blood cells and the cavillary and it's a pretty nice illustration of
what sort of contact between astrocyte. Along with pass some buffering and energy they also
have these structure. Now other than astrocytes, are another type of cellular, they do something a
bit different. Neurons can't function alone. During development, what happens is that single
extension coming off that sense the firing impulse it's insulated by second class fuel cell called
exocytes. What they do they take their extensions and wrap the axons in these neurons. They are
just wrapping different axons. We call that wrapping neuron axons. We call the experience as
process myelination. We'll get into a little bit more detail. When a neuron decides to fire, and
send a pulse down to the axon the speed which the signals conducted determined by how fast it's
myelinated. So a neuron cannot function properly unless that action control is way too fast. Lets
talk about what happens when a dendrite receives incoming information, so the protrusions are
called synapses. You don't need to know more about this. What happens is that the firing bolt

sent down to an axon leads out to a chemical by the axon terminal. That chemical binds a
receptor. I'm sorry, thats enough. So information go up and electrical pulse goes down. Chemical
gets spilled out after that. That process where chemical gets spit out is called is exocytosis. What
happens when exocytosis is not a firing like a sprinkler system. What happens is that these
chemicals are packaged in rounded vesicles. They fuse with the axonal membrane. There are
pores that open up during this process. The process is called exocytosis. Now a couple things to
mention here, if neurons are firing large number of times the membrane would just explode,
reason why it doesn't happen is the neurons would exhibit a snapping vesicle recycle those points
where the vesicle are fusing to the membrane will be specifically cut and then grows back
membrane that was used to cover chemical recycling process. Now we are at a point where we
have chemical sitting nexting to a space between two realms and effectively the message gets
changed from electrical one that pulls one on the axon to a chemical one within the synapses. It's
binding receptors. When transmitors bound receptors on the dendrites its causing changes in
electrical potential ultimately enough change will cause a fire. Why is neurons constant firing?
Well chemicals recycle itself. It recycles in a couple different ways. (Look at Slide #24 for info
on the recycle) One of the last ways that it's not really understood as well is that if you have a
neuron thats pumping off enough transmitter the localized concentration of that chemical is
gonna build up and literally chemicals will start to fuse away. What is interesting there is that
there are classes of receptors interacting with other kinds of neurons and we're beginning to
understand what the function might be there. So to review there are 4 ways that you should
remember on how a transmitter is recycled. It can be a valve, it can be taken off by a pump, that
pump can be astrocyte, it can diffuse away. So there are other kinds of transmitters in the brain
that are not taken off by transporters and astrocytes. Chemicals like dopamine and narcone are
specific to those chemicals. It is often targetted by pharmaceutical research. It's 10:06 are you
guys interested in going on? It's up to you. -------Silence-------------