How does the brain process information?

An overview of how the brain processes information and creates thoughts and memories.

Many questions about the brain continue to intrigue neuroscientists today: How does the brain develop? Are there stages of brain development? Are there critical periods when certain events must occur for the brain to develop normally? And, perhaps most importantly, how does the brain process information?

Throughout this article we will try to understand the latter: how our brain processes the information it receives from outside the body, and how it stores and processes it.But first, we will discuss some basic concepts that will help us to better understand the functioning of this marvelous and complex organ.

Some basic concepts

To understand how our brain is able to process the information it receives from the environment, we must first know how it works inside. Nerve cells or neurons are the cells that receive information from other nerve cells or sensory organs. These neurons are equipped with a cell body, a kind of metabolic heart, and a huge tree-like structure called a dendritic field, which is the input side of the neuron.

Information reaches the cell from projections called axons.. Most of the excitatory information reaches the cell from the dendritic field, often through small dendritic projections called spines. The junctions through which information passes from one neuron to another are called synapses, which can be excitatory or inhibitory in nature.

Synaptic connections are aggregated in the brain in several ways; one of them is through the overproduction of synapses and subsequent selective loss. Overproduction and loss of synapses is a fundamental mechanism that the brain uses to incorporate information from experience, and tends to occur during early periods of development.

For example, in the visual cortex, the area of the cerebral cortex of the brain that controls vision, a person has many more synapses at 6 months of age than in adulthood. This is because more and more synapses are formed in the first months of life, and then disappear, sometimes in large numbers. The time required for this phenomenon to run its course varies in different parts of the brain, from 2 to 3 years in the human visual cortex to 8 to 10 years in some parts of the frontal cortex.

The nervous system establishes a large number of connectionsThe experience is reproduced in this network, selecting appropriate connections and eliminating inappropriate ones. What remains is a refined final form that forms the sensory and perhaps cognitive basis for later stages of development. The second method of synapse formation is by the addition of new synapses.

Unlike the overproduction and loss of synapses, this process of synapse addition operates throughout human life and is especially important in later life. This process is not only sensitive to experience, but is actually driven by it. The addition of synapses probably underlies some, or even most, forms of memory. But before storing and processing information, the brain needs to encode and filter it. Let's see how.

How does the brain process information?

Information processing begins with input from the sensory organs, which transform physical stimuli such as touch, heat, sound waves or light photons into electrochemical signals.which transform physical stimuli such as touch, heat, sound waves or light photons into electrochemical signals. Sensory information is repeatedly transformed by the brain's algorithms in both upstream and downstream processing.

For example, when looking at an image of a black box on a white background, bottom-up processing gathers very simple information such as color, orientation, and where the edges of the object are, where the color changes significantly in a short space (to decide that you are looking at a box). Top-down processing uses the decisions made in some steps of bottom-up processing to speed up object recognition.

Once the information is processed to some extent, an attentional filter decides how important the signal is and what cognitive processes should be available. For example, although the brain processes every blade of grass when you look at your shoes, a specific attentional filter prevents you from noticing them individually, a specific attentional filter prevents you from noticing them individually.. In contrast, your brain is able to perceive and hear your name, even when you are in a noisy room.

There are many stages of processing, and the results of processing are modulated by attention repeatedly. However, for the brain to process information, it must first be stored. Let's see how it does this.

The storage of information

For the brain to process information, it must first be stored. There are multiple types of memory, including sensory and short-term memory, working memory and long-term memory. First, the information must be encoded, and there are different types of encoding specific to different types of sensory stimuli.

For example, verbal input can be encoded structurally, referring to how the printed word looks; phonologically, referring to how the word sounds; or semantically, referring to what the word means. Once information is stored, it must be maintained. Some animal studies suggest that working memory, which stores information for about 20 seconds, is maintained by an electrical signal that runs through a particular series of neurons for a short period of time.

As for long-term memory, it has been suggested that the information that manages to consolidate in this store is maintained in the structure of certain types of proteins. All in all, there are numerous models of how knowledge is organized in the brain, some based on how human subjects retrieve memories, some based on informatics and computation, and some based on neurophysiology.Some are based on the way in which human subjects retrieve memories, others are based on informatics and computation, and still others are based on neurophysiology.

The semantic network model, for example, states that there are nodes that represent concepts and that these nodes are linked according to their relationship. For example, in a semantic network, the word "chair" might be linked to "table," which might be linked to "wood," and so on. Another model is the connectionist model, which asserts that a piece of knowledge is represented simply by a pattern of neural activation rather than by meaning.

There is still no universally accepted model of knowledge organization, because each has its strengths and weaknesses.because each has its strengths and weaknesses, so more research is needed in this regard.

Information retrieval.

Once stored, memories eventually must be retrieved from the memory store. Recalling past events is not like watching a video recording. In fact, it has more to do with a process of reconstructing what might have happened based on the details the brain chose to store and was able to recall.

Information retrieval is triggered by a cue, an environmental stimulus that prompts the brain to retrieve the information. that prompts the brain to retrieve the memory in question. Evidence shows that the better the retrieval signal, the greater the chances of remembering something. It is important to note that the retrieval signal can also cause a person to reconstruct a memory incorrectly.

Distortions in memories can occur in a number of ways, including varying the wording of a question. For example, simply asking someone whether a black car had left the scene of a crime can cause the person to recall seeing a black car during subsequent questioning. This has been consistently observed in studies with witnesses in court cases, which have shown how easy it is to manipulate and implant false memories.

Studies in this field also indicate that the mind is not just a passive recorder of events, but actively works to both store and storeIt actively works to both store and retrieve information. Research shows that when presented with a series of events in a random sequence, people rearrange them into sequences that make sense when they try to recall them.

Memory retrieval, therefore, requires revisiting the neural pathways in the brain formed when encoding a memory, and the strength of those pathways determines how quickly it can be retrieved. Such retrieval effectively returns a memory located in the long-term store to the short-term or working memory, where it can be re-accessed, re-recorded, and then retrieved.where it can be accessed again, in a kind of mirror image of the encoding process.

After all, the memory is stored again in the long-term memory, which again consolidates and strengthens it. In short, our memory system is as complex as it is efficient, although much research remains to be done.

Bibliographical references:

• Anderson, J. A., & Hinton, G. E. (2014). Models of information processing in the brain. In Parallel models of associative memory (pp. 33-74). Psychology Press.
• Cabrera Cortés, I. A. (2003). El procesamiento humano de la información: en busca de una explicación. acimed, 11(6).
• Insel, T. R., & Fernald, R. D. (2004). How the brain processes social information: searching for the social brain. Annu. Rev. Neurosci., 27, 697-722.
• Sakurai, Y. (1999). How do cell assemblies encode information in the brain?. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 23(6), 785-796.