Considering how much effort is required to just get a handful of qbits in the lab, I find it highly unlikely that we've got heretofore undetected qbits hiding in our (and, presumably every other animal's) nervous systems.
Maybe I'm over-interpreting, but how is it possible we didn't know something so basic?
I would have expected neurons to have been thoroughly instrumented and tested.
We know the connections and the neurons but we don’t know the connection strengths and the exact neurotransmitter mixes that work on them. This is just the bare minimum information we need to even try and simulate the system and we don’t have it..
While true, the complexity of each organelle in the brain is still much higher than that of the typical organ elsewhere in the body. That and there is a high degree of connectivity and feedback between components where the API is completely and totally undocumented. It's not that you don't know what the known API calls do, you don't have any clue on how many API calls there even are. Accidently emulating one of these calls when attempting to trigger a different behavior can lead to wildly unexpected outcomes.
Also, sometimes, doing the experiment is extremely hard. I know a guy who only slightly jokingly claims he got his Ph.D. on one brain cell. He spent a couple of years building a setup to measure electrical activity of neurons, and 'had' one cell for half an hour or so (you stick an electrode in a cell, hope it doesn't die in the process, and then hope your subject animal remains perfectly subdued, and that there will not be external vibrations that make your electrode move, thus losing contact with the cell or killing it)
Reproducible? Many people could do it, if they made the effort, but how long it would take is anybody's guess.
Experiments like that require a lot of fingerspitzengefühl from those performing them. Worse, that doesn't readily translate between labs. For example, an experimental setup in a small lab might force an experimenter in a body posture that makes his hand vibrate less when doing the experiment. If he isn't aware of that advantage, he will not be able to repeat his experiment in a better lab (I also know guys who jokingly stated they got best results with a slight hangover; there might have been some truth in that)
Reminds me of a lecturer I had in a neuroscience class that informed us that "no one really checked whether all neurons had the same constants as the ones from the giant squid, but just assumed they did" (or something similar). Apparently anyone who thought of it assumed that something so blindingly obvious would already have been examined by someone else. It took decades before the error was found.
I am not sure we positively know every single detail there is to know about neurons, but we know an excruciating amount of details. At the level of a single neuron, it's physiology and connections to neighbouring neurons, we know everything we need to know that it has absolutely nothing to do with QM. There are no mysterious phenomena here, nothing outside biochemistry and physiology.
The fact that we still don't know whether or not adult brains produce new neurons is incredible to me. It feels like we know so much as a species. But at the same time we're all just wandering around in these poorly-understood meat suits.
While I cannot say for certain that neurons are not the only thing responsible for these behaviors, I'm fairly confident in saying that we don't know nearly enough about neurons to assume that 7,400 equates to "pretty simple".
There really isn’t a lot more going on in there though based on our current understanding of the brain. It’s neurons and synapses and all the neurotransmitters that regulate it all. What exactly are you suggesting could be the problem?
"Studies have found that those with higher I.Q.s, for example, enjoy a longer stretch of time during which new synapses continue to proliferate" this assertion that there is empirical evidence for this hypothesis is almost certainly false.
We just don't have the technology to do this experiment on human beings - the only species for which this statement can make sense.
I know of some studies which have observed synapse formation in vitro, perhaps one in vivo in animals kept alive through strenuous means, but all in mice and with no simultaneous behavioral examination.
Size of the neurons matter, but ultimately we don't know enough about biological cognition to say anything about existing animals, let alone long extinct ones.
"It's also important to note that these neurons have only been detected in mice so far, and the research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so we need to wait for further confirmation before we can really delve into what this discovery could mean for humans."
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