Neuron the Memory Unit of the Brain

Abstract

For long, the human brain has intrigued Researchers, Psychologist, Doctors and everyone alike. It has left many unanswered questions and the more it is studied the more questions arise. This paper presents a comparison with the Human brain with that of the Memory System of the Computer. Undoubtedly Technology has progressed to such an extent that one is able to store and retrieve, but how far have we progressed? Are the machines better in storing than our grey matter inside our hard skull? The Human Brain memory is far more complex than the whole of the computer world and fascinating to an extent we cannot even understand the complexity completely. I. Introduction The human brain has amazed and baffled people throughout the ages. Some scientists and doctors have devoted their entire lives to learning how the brain works. The human brain is considered by most of the scientists as the most complex living structure known in the universe, it has the almost the same structure as the brain of animal, is over three times as large as the brain of a typical animal with an equivalent body size, and much more complex. The human brain is made of discrete individual cell called neuron. It was only during the last decade of the nineteenth century that the terminology we use today was coined by the German researcher Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz. The term ‗neuron' was introduced in 1891. The Neurons are the living cells which are the storage units in our brain. They are micro organisms that store the information. The human brain is an organ of the body, and a biological extension of the human organism. The human organism is a living entity, and every part of it, including the brain, is alive, too. Since the brain is a living system, it exhibits key characteristics of living organisms. The brain is not some passive blob of organic mass that sits inside the skull. Even a mature brain responds to environmental influences by changing its form and function. Learning and living of the brain are ongoing lifelong processes. They affect both the brain function and structure. No man-made machine has such properties. To this day, we have developed no machinery or technical mechanisms to compare the brain with. However, once the brain is understood, it will become clear that life and the function of the brain are inseparably connected. To really understand how the brain represents memory, we must understand how memory is represented by the fundamental computational units of the brain - single neurons - and their networks,‖ said Peter N. Steinmetz, MD, PhD, program director of neuroengineering at Barrow and senior author of the study.