Neurons and We !

Recently I was reading about how neurons are developed,why do we forget things etc. and after learning about it found it really interesting.

Neuron is the building block of our memory. Whatever we learn our brain store it in  form of neurons and the information gets transferred in form of electrical signals known as synapses. There is a mega neural network behind all our learning and information processing.

When a child is born it has a very sparse network of neurons as it has limited information to store. But as the baby starts growing it comes across a lot more data and information to process. This is the time when the neural architecture starts growing exponentially as everything the baby come across gets stored in the network because every information is new for the system. From relations to emotions everything is stored in form of neurons. Till early teenage the network keeps on growing as we learn new things everyday.

But can we keep on adding neurons like this?
No, as neurons are also physical entities and  consumes lot of energy to operate. It is like a mega data center more the number of drives and connections higher is the maintenance charges. So, its the time for filtering out the irrelevant and less important neuron connections out of the dense neuron architecture that has been developed over the time.
That is why we don’t remember much about what happened in out early childhood and only the most significant memories are kept alive, rest all connections are filtered out.
This deletion of connections is known as synaptic pruning.
At this stage the dense network becomes more stable that learns most important information and leaves out the less significant one. That’s why we don’t remember what exactly we ate 5 years back on a particular day but we do remember if that meal is related to an important event of our life like we do remember it if that particular meal caused us some serious infection.
And as we grow old our body becomes weak and not able to handle this dense network of neurons. That is when our neural network gets weaker as our body is unable to maintain this high demanding architecture. Because of this phenomenon only at old age we start forgetting things because neurons don’t have enough power to synapse and connections become very weak. This phenomenon is known as neural degeneration. At this stage again the network gets sparse.

Happy reading!