Odolfo Llinás comes from a long line of physicians; there are four generations of doctors in his family. But this physician-scientist’s insights on health and sickness come from studying some of the smallest structures in the brain: tiny channels, no more than 10 nanometers across, in the walls of neurons. Llinás probes the way nerve cells use these channels to manage and transmit electric signals. Textbooks say that in a neuron, electrical or chemical inputs at one end of the cell spark an action potential (a rapid voltage change) that pulses along the cell and activates connections on the other end. That simple explanation glosses over most of what neurons really do, Llinás has found. Along with these events, neurons engage in constant low-level electrical communications, a kind of intrinsic chatter. In the 1980s Llinás also demonstrated that
Neurons don’t just respond to information but set up their own rhythmic activity. Groups of neurons oscillate together, and he argues that changes in these fluctuations underlie perception, attention, and consciousness itself.
In his lab at New York University, Llinás described to Discover his unconventional view of the brain, one that emphasizes frequency, time, and coherence as much as anatomy and neurochemistry. From his perspective, thinking and sensing begin inside the head, in electrical reverberations that are modified by outside information. Llinás’s version of the brain is not an input-output machine, reactive in nature. Internal activity is where everything begins: We all truly live inside our heads.
Discover: People often think that the brain mirrors the outside world. You counter that it functions intrinsically. What’s the difference between these views?
