BIO 11 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Illusory Contours, Neuroglia, Blackboard
Document Summary
The brain is the most complicated and sophisticated organ created by evolution: ~100 billion neurons, each neuron is connected directly to ~7000 other neurons (~100-500 trillion synapses, even more glial cells (~500 billion to ~1 trillion) Each neuron is also covered by thousands of receptors that respond to neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, hormones, etc. We will focus mostly on the visual system. What our sensory systems do is incredibly hard. The sensory information we get is ambiguous. Somehow you can drive in a snowstorm: but it"s extremely hard to train a computer to do it. Your brain actively constructs your sensory experience: your visual system is not like a camera faithfully capturing images, everything you see is actively constructed, color, shading, texture, motion, shape, etc. This internal model of the world is built by innate rules combined with your own experiences, including your memories, emotions, logic, and beliefs.
