The human brain can create structures in up to 11 dimensions

Neuroscientists have used the application of sophisticated mathematics to peer into the structure of our brains. What they’ve discovered is that the brain contains multi-dimensional geometrical structures and spaces within the networks of our brains that operate in 11 dimensions.  

 

We’re used to seeing the world in 3 dimensions, but this recent study is opening up new research into the brain and how we perceive reality. Algebraic topology, popularly known as “rubber-sheet geometry”, is used to study different kinds of hole structures, and scientists say the research has significant implications for our understanding of the brain.

 

 “We found a world that we had never imagined,” says neuroscientist Henry Markram, director of Blue Brain Project and professor at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. “There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.” 

 

This is one of those “wow” moments for science.

We simply can’t wrap our brains around the concept of such complicated structures, as we understand the world in only four dimensions – three spatial dimensions plus time. These dimensions refer to how neuron cliques are connected. We can’t imagine it, but mathematics can describe these connections.
It’s truly ground-breaking.
Using algebraic topology in a way that it has never been used before, mathematicians Kathryn Hess from EPFL and Ran Levi from Aberdeen University discovered a whole new world that holds untold implications for our understanding of the brain.
Explains Hess: “Algebraic topology is like a telescope and microscope at the same time. It can zoom into networks to find hidden structures — the trees in the forest — and see the empty spaces — the clearings — all at the same time.”

Numbers and connections

Human brains are estimated to have a staggering 86 billion neurons, with multiple connections from each cell webbing in every possible direction, forming the vast cellular network that somehow makes us capable of thought and consciousness.
To perform the mathematical tests, the team used the first digital copy of a piece of the neocortex — the most evolved part of the brain and the seat of our sensations, actions, and consciousness that the Blue Brain Project team published back in 2015.

Virtual sand castles

In this latest research, using algebraic topology, multiple tests were performed on the virtual brain tissue and then also on real brain tissue.
The researchers found their virtual brain tissue reacted in highly organised manner to stimulus – by building and then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, writes Dean.
“The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materialises out of the sand and then disintegrates.”
What do we have here? Zillions of neurons, two highly specialized scientific fields and only the beginnings of unraveling the thing we’re studying using the thing we’re studying.