The Purpose Of Neurons!

THE BRAIN.

The primary function of the brain is not thought processes!

A neuron is nothing but a Turin device, each input is modified by an inner function to generate the output. This causes the inner function itself to also be modified, altering the treatment of the next input in the process.
Inputs are chemical in nature, calcium ions, but regarded as energy levels, the same is true for the output.

In other words;

As, lets say, an organ is being generated by the DNA strand of a fetus each new cell has the ability to signal its presence.
The neuron will alter the behavior of the DNA transcription through the neuronal weight provided by the simple feed back mechanisms embedded in the cells themselves.

Once a creature as been generated, no matter how simplistic that creature may be, the neurons that served to control its generation aren't discarded. They stay attached to the muscle fibers or the organs, or what ever it was that they served to generate. From that point they serve to maintain and control that particular structure.

This may not be a brain yet but it s the beginning of biological event processing.

These neurons, and small neural network, receive constant signals from the cells of a structure and react to those signal according to an alterable set of chemical structures embedded in the neurons themselves.

Some thing lies hidden in plain site here!

The first neuron could not have been created by the organism themselves. It was an invader!

A simple cell with a simple genome, a bit like the ancestors of the trees, somehow found itself trapped within an archaic multi-cellular organism's cell structure. And its genome ended up being completely mixed with that organism's genome through a series of simultaneous reproduction.

The end result was that the organism now produced a new variant of that cell at regular interval within its replication cycles. Having kept its archaic tree structure, this new cell now had the ability to link up to other cells through its branches. These cells had no purpose of their own save for the exchange of chemicals through their branches. And since their sole existence, before becoming part of the multi-cellular organism, was drawing chemical elements from the environment and charring them along their branches to other cells in an archaic tree like structure, while simultaneously pushing outwards transformed chemicals, that's just what they kept doing.

You see neurons didn't rise as a need from complex organism.

NO! NO! NO!
THEY ARE the cause of cell differentiation and therefor of complex organisms!

I know that i've passed over the evolution of that archaic tree like cell to justify my premiss so in extreme short:

"
Our planet was filled with co2 some 4.5G Y ago.
A cell capable of metabolizing it into oxygen achieved total domination of the planet.
But, as if they were perfect little humans, they consumed almost all the co2, because they over populated the earth (and therefor over consumed), and they over polluted, because the oxygen was deadly to them.
So they almost all died.
The soil provided an escape from the deadly oxygen, and the only reserves of precious live giving co2.
Other cells evolved during that final period capable of metabolizing the deadly oxygen back into co2.
When these two cells encountered they formed a symbiosis feeding each other their waste and pushing the rest out wards.
As they were link together, their reproduction cycles became synchronized and eventually their individual genomes were pushed into a singular cell. This gave rise to a new set of cells capable of metabolizing co2 into oxygen and pushing it then outwards without being poisoned by it.

These cells could stay link together forming basic tree structures, of a couple nano to a couple micro meters in length, exchanging chemical element in perfect symbiosis. And if pieces of it broke of they could re-generate a tree structure all over again.

And as you can clearly see, this simple little cell, with its simple little genome, is the perfect culprit here because it has all the basic characteristics of a neuron.

As i said "In extreme short!"

"

Here we find natural selection in all its glory!

Not in gene mutations but rather in cell configurations due to these new cells linking up to the other cells, of our previously mentioned multi-cellular organism, and generating a wide variety of cellular configurations, by controlling the chemical exchanges between the various cells of the organism. And viability is key.

A multi-cellular organism as a bit of a clock work mechanism.
Perpetual motion of some sorts.
But for it to be maintained a precise flow of specific chemical elements must flow in a precise series of sequences.
To truly succeed in surviving an organism must have the ability to react to, and interact with, its surroundings in a fashion that helps that perpetual motion to remain perpetual.


The most viable will therefor have these new cells being able to communicate between one another, as they control the chemical flows between the various cells of these now constantly changing/evolving multi-cellular organism.

Through time, and because it is extremely beneficial, clumps of these cells are formed pre-configured to manipulate chemical flows in a specifics fashion, causing a large series of newly generated cells to acquire a particular structure and perform a particular function within the organism.

And, again , through time these clumps starts to perform their functions of chemical control from the outside of the organism towards the inside and vice versa. Slowly forming larger and larger lumps, as this proves beneficial in analyzing and finding the requirements to maintain the perpetual motion.

Simultaneously these same cells continues to modify the various cellular formations withing the organism until the creatures have reached a point where it is now the events of nature and the organisms life experiences that begins to shape its evolution.

And at that point the creature will inherently have a certain series of attributes that are required for this new evolutionary steps;

1) The means to sense the environment.
2) The means to move through the environment
3) The means to analyze the benefits and the costs of actions

From here we can see how a fish species would eventually acquire lungs:

Through the simple action of the tides, or even by jumping towards presumed sources of foods, fishes find themselves stuck out of water. And if today they tend to be eaten pretty quickly, it wasn't the case before land creatures.

Through repeated survival a fish would have learned that it can pull on its esophagus to force oxygen into its brain, well not in that detail but you know what i mean.

The lungs are nothing but an extension of that, bags being pulled on by the thorax muscles forcing them to fill with the outside air as they are stretched. And the lung tissues are nothing but a variation of the osmosis tissues of a fish's dermic layers.

In the same process did the fines transform into appendages by these fishes now equipped with these archaic lunged systems using their fines to propel themselves back into the water.

These evolutionary steps weren't caused by genetic mutations!
THEY WERE the cause of genetic mutation!
As first the brain, through the Epi-Genetic structure, caused these morphological changes to occur they lead to an increase in survival and procreation rates. This then through procreation itself, during the gene recombination period, causes the genome to be altered to facilitate the generation of these new beneficial traits.

And in the end these "NEURONS" Still basically serve nothing but that function of maintaining the perpetual cellular motion. But every time a new structure emerges within an organism so is the neural mass modified to accommodate the signal processing to and fro that structure in order to maintain and control it all the while conserving the previously acquired functions to maintain and control the organism and keep its cells in their state of pseudo perpetual motion.

It's the Epi-Genetic dance between the DNA and the brain of an organism!

It's in this process that the small neural masses slowly developed into an archaic brain of a hand full of cells to thousands to millions to billions.

This eventually leads to a brain so big that it actually has vast amounts of neurons that are idle almost all of the time.

And, so does the creature now posses the ability to pirate its own brain functions, as to be affected by the events of its life.

Thought processes are born!

A thought is a consciously sustained set and/or series of neural functions. An ape find an ants nest with a tree branch stuck in it. It see's the ants walking up the branch and it starts to eat the ants.

The ape is hungry and as he thinks of eating he remembers the ants and the tree branch. So the ape returns there but the branch is no longer in the hole. it's now on the ground. So the ape picks up the stick and stick's it in the hole. Ants starts climbing up the branch.

First signals from the body caused the emotion, hunger, which triggered the desire to eat. No conscious act here!

But then the ape could have chosen anything from fruits to nuts to ants etc...

Brain triggers.

Images are being flashed in front of a man in a relax state. Amongst the many images are repetitions of Hale Berry. And every time her face appears within the succession of images a single neuron, and always the same, in the man's brain starts to fire up.

You are asleep! suddenly the phone rings. Your brain, in sleep mode, starts to reverberate. The signal from your hear causes an energy wave that flares up the brain, lighting it up completely for a brief moment.

You are in a relax state, someone asks you to think of something, 1 neuron starts to fire a specific pattern causing others to link up in a reverberating chain. As you sustain the thought a complete neuronal chain is linked up to all the elements of that thought in your brain and the image of that thought surges in your mind's eye.

So the ape chose the ants. It could have gone anywhere to any nests, but it remember the pleasure, the joy, of the ease of the nest with the stick in it.

So the ape returned to that particular nest, but the stick wasn't in the hole anymore. Could have said "Shoot" and moved on!

But the ape decided to try and stick the stick into the hole and "EUREKA" it worked.

Learned behavior through conscious pirating of series and/or sets of neuronal functions.

And we have evolution through neuronal functions!

Comments are always welcome, no matter how brief!

Wishing you peaceful but event filled lives!

Stéphane Vincent