Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2013

An engineering analog for the function of astrocytes and their implication in attentional awareness: A theory

A few days ago I was thinking about our brains amazing ability to switch focus on features within an incoming sensory data stream. It has always fascinated me when I probed it in a biological mind frame but I realized this morning after waking a new idea that may explain how attention is performed in the brain. The idea inspires this article now after I read a post by a friend on Facebook regarding the startled behavior of his cat when ever he takes the vacuum cleaner out of the closet. I realized in that example how my dream could explain its behavior. I assert that when we finally understand the mammalian brain fully we'll be able to prove that the cats brain has an unusually long attentional neuronal pathway. Recent research in the area of explaining how mammalian brains switch attention seems to implicate a critical role for glial cells in the process of allowing us to keep our attention on certain things in each of our sensory dimensions....for example, your ability to tun