How Is the Brain Wired?
Our brain works like a high performing, multi-agent engineering system, says Sri Sarma, PhD, a biomedical engineer and Johns Hopkins University professor. In this video, Dr. Sarma explains how our neurons collect information and communicate.
Transcript
If I were to make an analogy to, say, an engineering system and how our brain works as sort of this highly engineered, high performing system,
I would think multiagent system. So this is sort of modern engineering. Let's think of a battlefield. We can deploy multiple robots on this battlefield.
Each robot is an agent that is sensing information, so it carries these sensors and is able to sense information, at least locally,
around its environment. So each individual agent will send some information. It can be noisy; however, they can communicate
that with its neighbors. So agents locally around that agent. And so as this sort of network of agents
are collecting information sensing the environment, they have to make local decisions in order to meet some kind of global objective.
So you have this highly networked communication control system that has some global objective, which is make
sure we're safe for example. Make sure we don't get attacked. We attack before we get attacked kind of thing. So I view the brain very similarly.
We have neurons or population neurons, which we can consider agents. Each neuron has his own job, senses certain information
about our environment. And what is the whole brain's global objective? Maybe at the end of the day, I want
to go pick up a glass of water and drink it. But I'm going to gather multiple information
about my environment. So how I can execute that very seamlessly. So I kind of view this as sort of this highly complicated
brain health nervous system
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