Are dopamine, serotonin, etc “training” chemicals that help establish pathways rather than active signalling chemicals?
Specifically, they work like something closer to “traffic lights” while peptide binding to astrocytes determine the actual “information” being transmitted.
This indicates that the integrative process is mostly a reconfiguration of peptides integrated upward. Mechanically, this provides an actual non-magical way for information to be transferred, a specific peptide receptor is activated on both ends of the neuron, which is filled in by the astrocytes in the upstream/downstream connection. These peptides represent the building blocks of a brain, and receptor complexity represents construct flexibility.
Interestingly under this conceit it would mean that diversity of RNA expressiveness would be a type of “intelligence”, it’s a measure of how flexibly brains can induce expression changes to manage information.
Important question, how diverse are the receptors on astrocytes for “stored” information vs. “no information” groups?
This adds so much flexibility to the current understanding of how signalling works. With this conceit we completely obviate the need to explain how the amazingly inconsistent signalling environments within brains somehow produce consistent results. Instead what we are seeing with group level activation like “theta” waves are a signal that’s being blasted until an astrocyte confirms that it’s recorded the necessary peptide binding, at which point it emits a calcium signal to suppress further information. We can see GABA and Glu as governors of the type of differentialization being performed since they evaluate over the dorsal and ventral streams in place. Other transmitters work as functional bindings (from the nervous system’s perspective, not shit like the DMN) for diverse regions of cells.
I keep coming to a metaphor of playing chords on an instrument, where an impulse is combined with discrete positional inhibitors to make a sound, and the combination of these sounds in a sequence makes a memory (or song).
What mechanic enforces sequentiality? Are they checked dorsal vs. ventral for error score or is there some other mechanic?
The more I think about this, the more obvious it is to me that memory/behavior are complexifications of quorum sensing we see in yeast (for example). External stimuli modifies RNA expression which gears creation of particulates that serve as the basis of behavioral responses.
Another analogy from a different perspective, one of the most ducked aspects of neuroscience is how do diverse groups of cells manage to signal each other accurately? For example if the hippocampal stream needs to pull parts of an engram together for behavioral/memory recreation, how is it able to address the particular astrocytes which are storing the information?
Thinking of cellular addressing as… well think of a physical street address you’d write on an envelope. We have our top level address which would equate to “Country”, and this would be something like GABA/Glu signalling. The next level down would be “State”, which would be represented by the more popular neurotransmitters, on down to city, street, and unit numbers, ultimately represented by peptide configurations (or maybe peptides represent street level, and there’s still another mechanic below that).
All of the street numbers on a street are stored sequentially in an astrocyte population, and when the request is made by the brainstem or hippocampus, it looks in it’s local look up table (white pages in a phone book), and signals for a return of all addresses on a street. One of the cool tricks to this is that you can have the same street name in multiple different cities or states, and with one request you can return a bunch of similar street data from different regions of the brain.
This information is then collated in the hippocampus (DG->CA3), Filtered for reference/error (CA2), then stapled into a “coherent” stack (CA1).
Ugh, the street analogy has a few problems, trying to think of something more coherent. Wondering if I can make a visualization of it.