 |
 | This article possibly contains original research .(May 2021) |
Neuroheuristics (or neuristics) studies the dynamic relations within neuroscientific knowledge, using a transdisciplinary studies approach. It was proposed by Alessandro Villa in 2000. [1]
|
| This article possibly contains original research .(May 2021) |
Neuroheuristics (or neuristics) studies the dynamic relations within neuroscientific knowledge, using a transdisciplinary studies approach. It was proposed by Alessandro Villa in 2000. [1]
The word comes from the Greek νεύρον (neuron, which refers to the nerve cell [2] ) and εύρισκω ("euriskein", heuristic, which refers to problem-solving procedures characterized by informal, intuitive and speculative features [3] ).
Neuroheuristics defines a scientific paradigm aimed to develop strategies that can be enabled to understand brain and mind following subsequent problems emerging from transdisciplinary studies including philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, pharmacology, physics, artificial intelligence, engineering, computer science, economics and mathematics.
The research framework introduced by the neuroheuristic paradigm appears as an essential step for the investigation of the information processing effected by the brain because it is the outcome of nature and nurture, at the crossing of top-down and bottom-up design.
Neurobiologists apply a bottom-up research strategy in their studies. This strategy has been able to describe a simple organism's nervous system, such as Caenorhabditis elegans . [4] [5] [6] [7] However, it would be impossible to simultaneously examine all neurons and all variables. This limits the value experimentation using this method could provide.
The top-down strategy with the assistance of black box theory appears easier to complete, but inappropriate for understanding the mechanisms which coordinate neurons.
The paradigm offers a needed and possibly distinct approach to the study of brain and mind. [8] [9] [10] [11]
In this framework, a result cannot be simply positive or negative because the process itself cannot be reduced to proficiency as such.[ clarification needed ] Dynamics is an essential feature of the neuroheuristic paradigm, but it is more than just the neurobiological facet of holism as opposed to reductionism.[ clarification needed ]
A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a vertebrate's body. In a human, the cerebral cortex contains approximately 14–16 billion neurons, and the estimated number of neurons in the cerebellum is 55–70 billion. Each neuron is connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons. These neurons typically communicate with one another by means of long fibers called axons, which carry trains of signal pulses called action potentials to distant parts of the brain or body targeting specific recipient cells.
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.
In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes that impact the body, then works in tandem with the endocrine system to respond to such events. Nervous tissue first arose in wormlike organisms about 550 to 600 million years ago. In vertebrates it consists of two main parts, the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and spinal cord. The PNS consists mainly of nerves, which are enclosed bundles of the long fibers or axons, that connect the CNS to every other part of the body. Nerves that transmit signals from the brain are called motor nerves or efferent nerves, while those nerves that transmit information from the body to the CNS are called sensory nerves or afferent. Spinal nerves are mixed nerves that serve both functions. The PNS is divided into three separate subsystems, the somatic, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems. Somatic nerves mediate voluntary movement. The autonomic nervous system is further subdivided into the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is activated in cases of emergencies to mobilize energy, while the parasympathetic nervous system is activated when organisms are in a relaxed state. The enteric nervous system functions to control the gastrointestinal system. Both autonomic and enteric nervous systems function involuntarily. Nerves that exit from the cranium are called cranial nerves while those exiting from the spinal cord are called spinal nerves.
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
Neuroanatomy is the study of the structure and organization of the nervous system. In contrast to animals with radial symmetry, whose nervous system consists of a distributed network of cells, animals with bilateral symmetry have segregated, defined nervous systems. Their neuroanatomy is therefore better understood. In vertebrates, the nervous system is segregated into the internal structure of the brain and spinal cord and the routes of the nerves that connect to the rest of the body. The delineation of distinct structures and regions of the nervous system has been critical in investigating how it works. For example, much of what neuroscientists have learned comes from observing how damage or "lesions" to specific brain areas affects behavior or other neural functions.
Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals.
Neuroethology is the evolutionary and comparative approach to the study of animal behavior and its underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system. It is an interdisciplinary science that combines both neuroscience and ethology. A central theme of neuroethology, which differentiates it from other branches of neuroscience, is its focus on behaviors that have been favored by natural selection rather than on behaviors that are specific to a particular disease state or laboratory experiment.
Rodolfo Llinás Riascos is a Colombian and American neuroscientist. He is currently the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine. Llinás has published over 800 scientific articles.
Molecular neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience that observes concepts in molecular biology applied to the nervous systems of animals. The scope of this subject covers topics such as molecular neuroanatomy, mechanisms of molecular signaling in the nervous system, the effects of genetics and epigenetics on neuronal development, and the molecular basis for neuroplasticity and neurodegenerative diseases. As with molecular biology, molecular neuroscience is a relatively new field that is considerably dynamic.
Neuroinformatics is the field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron or to the target effector cell.
John Graham White is an Emeritus Professor of Anatomy and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests are in the biology of the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and laser microscopy.
Cornelia Isabella "Cori" Bargmann is an American neurobiologist. She is known for her work on the genetic and neural circuit mechanisms of behavior using C. elegans, particularly the mechanisms of olfaction in the worm. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. She was the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022. In 2012 she was awarded the $1 million Kavli Prize, and in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
A connectome is a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain, and may be thought of as its "wiring diagram". An organism's nervous system is made up of neurons which communicate through synapses. A connectome is constructed by tracing the neuron in a nervous system and mapping where neurons are connected through synapses.
Connectomics is the production and study of connectomes: comprehensive maps of connections within an organism's nervous system. More generally, it can be thought of as the study of neuronal wiring diagrams with a focus on how structural connectivity, individual synapses, cellular morphology, and cellular ultrastructure contribute to the make up of a network. The nervous system is a network made of billions of connections and these connections are responsible for our thoughts, emotions, actions, memories, function and dysfunction. Therefore, the study of connectomics aims to advance our understanding of mental health and cognition by understanding how cells in the nervous system are connected and communicate. Because these structures are extremely complex, methods within this field use a high-throughput application of functional and structural neural imaging, most commonly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electron microscopy, and histological techniques in order to increase the speed, efficiency, and resolution of these nervous system maps. To date, tens of large scale datasets have been collected spanning the nervous system including the various areas of cortex, cerebellum, the retina, the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular junctions.
UNC is a set of proteins first identified through a set of screening tests in Caenorhabditis elegans, looking for roundworms with movement problems. Worms with which were un-coordinated were analysed in order to identify the genetic defect. Such proteins include UNC-5, a receptor for UNC-6 which is one of the netrins. Netrins are a class of proteins involved in axon guidance. UNC-5 uses repulsion (genetics) to direct axons while the other netrin receptor UNC-40 attracts axons to the source of netrin production.
OpenWorm is an international open science project for the purpose of simulating the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans at the cellular level. Although the long-term goal is to model all 959 cells of the C. elegans, the first stage is to model the worm's locomotion by simulating the 302 neurons and 95 muscle cells. This bottom up simulation is being pursued by the OpenWorm community.
William Ronald Schafer is a neuroscientist and geneticist who has made important contributions to understanding the molecular and neural basis of behaviour. His work, principally in the nematode C. elegans, has used an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how small groups of neurons generate behavior, and he has pioneered methodological approaches, including optogenetic neuroimaging and automated behavioural phenotyping, that have been widely influential in the broader neuroscience field. He has made significant discoveries on the functional properties of ionotropic receptors in sensory transduction and on the roles of gap junctions and extrasynaptic modulation in neuronal microcircuits. More recently, he has applied theoretical ideas from network science and control theory to investigate the structure and function of simple neuronal connectomes, with the goal of understanding conserved computational principles in larger brains. He is an EMBO member, Welcome Investigator and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Eileen Southgate is a British biologist who mapped the complete nervous system of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, together with John White, Nichol Thomson, and Sydney Brenner. The work, done largely by hand-tracing thousands of serial section electron micrographs, was the first complete nervous system map of any animal and it helped establish C. elegans as a model organism. Among other projects carried out as a laboratory assistant at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), Southgate contributed to work on solving the structure of hemoglobin with Max Perutz and John Kendrew, and investigating the causes of sickle cell disease with Vernon Ingram.