That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites - Activating our Brain

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

When we talk about neuroscience, we usually mention our brain regions activating or firing. In today's neuroscience bite, we discuss what we mean by this, and how it helps us explain brain activity in general. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another neuroscience bite. Okay, this bite is in response to a question. Remember, at that neuroscience guy on Twitter, you can follow me, DM me, and send ideas. And the question that came in has actually come up a couple times, and I thought I should finally answer it, which is it's a problem on my fault. It's me miscommunicating, which is sometimes I say brain regions fire, and sometimes I say brain regions activate. And the question was, what's the difference, or do they mean the same thing? So here's the clarification. Your brain is basically made up of two types of cells. If

you ignore the vasculature, there's glial cells, which hold everything in place. And they have, they do metabolic things to help neurons keep firing and they do some other cool stuff. And I'm actually going to do a podcast episode on glial cells because they are really, really cool. a podcast episode on glial cells because they are really really cool uh but then there's neurons and neurons basically have one job they either fire or they don't fire so just to clarify what it means when i say a neuron fires it literally means the neuron has received sufficient input that's typically in the fault of the form of small electrical charges um and that's in the cell body basically those are all added up. And if there's enough, an electrical signal called an action potential is sent down the axon of the neuron.

And when it reaches the end of the neuron, the end of the axon, neurotransmitters released into the synapse. And that might trigger those small electrical potentials and the sequence is repeated. So when we say a neuron fires, we're talking about that action potential process. And when we say a brain region activates, what we really mean is that means millions of neurons are firing at the same time. The reason we use the word activate is not to confuse you. It's just when you get into neuroimaging and you start looking at maps of the brain and you see the little regions, you know, that are colored differently and that means that there's something going on, we talk about those brain regions being activated. But that is completely

synonymous with saying that millions of neurons are firing. So there's the clarification, brain region firing, brain region activated, they mean the same thing and at the end of the day we're just talking about a bunch of neurons firing and think about that for one second this always amazes me right now as you're listening everything you're thinking everything you're feeling everything you're experiencing is just a bunch of neurons in your brain firing in a very specific pattern anyway that's the bite for this week. Remember the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. Of course, Twitter, I mentioned at the outset, so I won't do it again. And thank you so much for listening to the podcast and subscribing. It means so much

to us. My name is Olv Kregolsen, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.