The Other half of the brain

THE OTHER HALF OF THE BRAIN

The Other Half of the Brain

The author offered an interesting account of Dr . Harvey who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein and experimented with his brain . It was discovered that the glia cells , so abundantly present in the human brain can be responsible for the Einstein 's uniqueness . Located in the association cortex , glia cells are unlike the neurons but were found to have a significant affect on the neurons through (first hypothetical communication between glia cells and neurons

Through the new findings (Edelman

, 1998 ) it was shown that glia cells influence the formation of synapses that are responsible for the quality of communication between the neurons . Obviously , if the synaptic connections are stronger than the person is capable of more and better associations , learning , and recall

In addition , another study provides evidence that glia cells establish its own communication network run in parallel to the neuron network . The article confirms that during the time when Einstein lived neuroscientists believed that glial cells were responsible for the information processing . Although it was agreed that the evidence simply was not there , the work continued and search once again focused on the mysterious function of the presence of glial cells . The author pointed out that the researchers assumed the insignificance due to the inefficiency of equipment to detect the glial chatter ' and the fact that they were looking at glial cells trying to duplicate their search with the same mode as that in neural network

According to the article , the recent discovery brought the light of this difference : the glial cells communicate chemically not electronically , as it was suspected following the neural model . Brave assertion suggested that the glial cells listen in ' to the neural communication and then react appropriately depending upon what they hear ' The author also added that according to the earlier work , the influx of calcium cells suggested that the glial cells had been stimulated ' That assumption was earlier confirmed through and with an imaginative innovation that allowed checking the calcium levels in Schwann cells , the glial cells that surround synapses where neurons meet . The author also wanted to know whether glial cells were limited to what he called eavesdropping ' or had more specialized function , like participating in the direct communication through the neural network Such hypothesis was later confirms with the described in detail experiment . The author continued describing his research with the supposition that something else was going on with glial cells . He was not satisfied with the finding that these particular cells were responding to the calcium influx . He used the 1990 study of Stephen J . Smith of Yale University that showed the increase of concentration in calcium in the cells called astrocytes , Such increase was caused when the neurotransmitter glutamate was added to a cell culture and doubled for the natural process during which the neurotransmitter is released by a neuron . Further of another work by S . Ben Kater in 1996 showed that astrocytes would use extra...