X-Message-Number: 26861 From: Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 04:01:00 EDT Subject: Re: CryoNet #26849 To Thomas Donaldson You said : I also note that Yvan Bozzonetti in msg #26838 discusses computer simulation of synapses. Yes, synapses can be quite complex. However I'd also say that unlike neurons, a single synapse does not need lots of computers to simulate. It's not got any parallelism, so that we don't run into the problems caused by simulating parallel machines with fewer machines: the problem I pointed out in my last message on computer-simulated brains (for Yvan). Are yor sure there is no parallelism in synapses ? What about the numerous ionic and metabotropic channels here ? Simulating a true synapse is not so simple, there are tension gated or neuromediator ionotropics systems, more than 1000 different metabotropic channels are known. I don't count the modulation by many peptides, ATP, adenosine, histamines, hormones, CO and NO gas,... The contracting spines or deformable ones, the double synapses on a single spine,... I would be curious how you define "simple" and "complex", where is the limit ? Yvan Bozzonetti. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26861