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Discovery of a Multidimensional Universe Inside the Brain

Recently, the Blue Brain Project has created a model that defines the brain as a structure built from multidimensional spaces and structures.

This new study helps us better understand our brains and may even give us clues to answer questions such as where memories are made in our brain.

The brain is an extremely complex organ, particularly the human brain, and science is still far from knowing all the aspects of its structure. Nonetheless, by using computer models, a team of scientists working on the Blue Brain Project are now working to better understand the brain.

[Credit: EPFL’s Blue Brain]

The latest model showed the brain as a multi-dimensional space and building structure.

"We found a world we had never imagined," said neuroscientist Henry Markram, Blue Brain Project director and professor at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

These structures exist in numerous numbers, in the smallest fleck of our brain, up to the seventh dimension. There were structures present as high as the eleventh dimension in some areas of the neural network.

When a group of neurons come together to form a clique, such as constructs, or constructions, are made. To create a new configuration, each neuron interacts with each neuron in the clique. As there are many neurons in the brain, as well as the number of systems in each clique, the more neurons, the more complex the system, and the more dimensions it contains.

Only when viewed in space, these dimensions are three-dimensional. When measuring these dimensions, it is just the difficulty of the structure and geometry that are used to mark them as greater than three dimensions.

Multi-dimensions are also used to define highly functional constructions and structures beyond mathematics, as Professor Cees van Leeuwen points out. Professor Leeuwen, based at KU Leuven, Belgium, is a reviewer of the analysis and states that the state of structures in state space is a good example of such a structure.

This space is defined as a union of the different levels of freedom in the process, and the state is the value given to these spaces by independence.

With an entity like the brain so intricate in its interactions, the authors seek to equate it with structures they are familiar to so that their study can be better understood, says Aberdeen University's Ran Levi, also one of the teams that worked on the paper. He emphasizes that you would only see a collection of trees or neurons working randomly without comparison.

Levi said they mapped the construction with the known universe within the neural network of the brain, allowing them to look at it from the point of view of multi-dimensional objects, leading them to better understand and function the buildings of the brain.

In a simulated brain structure generated on a computer, a process called algebraic topology was applied to the design and experiments were performed on living brain tissue to see the results.


The neurons eventually developed lower dimensions of cliques with gaps or cavities between them when a stimulus was inserted into the digital brain.

Levi observed that when the brain was focused on data processing this operation of making high-dimensional holes in the brain tissue meant that the neurons responded to the stimuli in a clearly defined way. The brain appears to construct and demolish multi-dimensional unit structures in response to stimuli, moving gradually from simple 1D (imagine rods) to 2D to 3D structures to increasingly complex higher-dimensional structures up to 7D (imagine multi-story buildings). The development is similar to different-level sandcastles and outcroppings, only for the next wave to break apart.

The next part of this research will focus on the practical role of those buildings taking place within the brain. The spaces within these cliques can also offer a clue when trying to understand how the mind creates and stores memories.

As Markram puts it, data in these cavities can be' hidden.'

This article Discovery of a Multidimensional Universe Inside the Brain has written based on original research which was published on Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience and it is published here under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

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