Brain function explained with Facebook

What happens in the brain when we make a decision is very concrete, but also quite technical and therefore perhaps a little difficult to understand.

To better understand myself, I've played around with using Facebook as a metaphor to explain it for a start. (So bear with me if you're a brain or Facebook nerd and you think I'm saying something that's a bit vague. I promise to make up for it :-)).

Here goes...

You have to imagine that every Facebook user is a nerve cell, and that every 'like' is a signal. If you are friends with someone on Facebook (i.e. have a connection), you have the ability to influence them, and they have the ability to influence you. People you are not friends with, you do not have the ability to directly influence, and they do not have the ability to influence you.

Imagine you are walking in a forest and come to a T-intersection. You can either go right or left. How do you make that decision?

You will use Facebook to come up with an answer, so you share two pictures on your Facebook wall: A picture with an arrow pointing right (right) and a picture with an arrow pointing left (left). The picture with the most likes overall wins.
One of your good friends, let's call her Anne, thinks that 'left' is best, and therefore shares the picture. Anne has a lot of friends. Some of Anne's friends like the picture, and a few of them think that the picture is so cool that they also share it. This means that their friends can also like and share the picture. So the picture 'left' gets a lot of likes. You have another friend, let's call her Susanne. Susanne likes the picture 'right', so she shares it. But Susanne doesn't have that many friends, so the picture 'left' ends up winning overall.

I don't know if you've noticed, but Facebook wants to give you as much of what you like as possible. You may have thought about the fact that even though you may have a lot of friends, you typically only see updates from a few of them. You may have also noticed that if you like something you don't usually like, you suddenly see more of that kind of thing in your Facebook feed. You can test this by finding an old friend on Facebook that you haven't talked to in a long time and liking something he or she has shared. In the near future, there's a good chance that you'll see more from your old schoolmate in your Facebook feed.

You can't blame Facebook for wanting to give its users more of what they like, because then they will probably use Facebook more, and therefore Facebook makes more money. We will return to the problematic aspect of this mechanism in Facebook, but right now I would like to use the example to point out that it actually also resembles some special properties of the brain, namely that the brain favors connections that are already strong , and the more these connections are used, the stronger they become . In the brain, this happens through a process called long-term potentiation . In short, the idea is that if a connection between two nerve cells is used a lot, it will become more efficient at transmitting the signal. In the Facebook metaphor, this means that if you have a friend who you often like posts from, the probability that Facebook will show you posts from this friend is greater, and therefore there is an even greater chance that you will like posts from this friend.

Cells that fire together, wire together

There are different types of long-term potentiation. The best known is called Hebb's LTP, named after Donald Hebb. Hebb's theories are often explained with the following expression: " Cells that fire together, wire together. " That is, cells that are connected to each other fire together. (It is more complicated than the quote suggests, but for our purposes it can be used just fine.)

The biggest problem with the Facebook explanation is that it's not very precise, so let's tighten it up a bit. In reality, nerve cells can't share anything with their "friends," they can only like . And when they like, they send like energy to the nerve cells they're connected to.

Unlike Facebook, they can like the same thing many times.

A nerve cell also has the property that if enough of its friends, and especially the kind of friends it is closely connected to, like it, then it likes it too - without having a choice. Now some might think that most people turn off their brains when they are on Facebook, but it's probably not THAT bad after all :-)

And unlike Facebook, not all people (nerve cells) in the brain are equal. The location of a nerve cell in the brain is crucial to its function. So, if we return to the example of the T-junction, it goes more like this: Imagine that you are a nerve cell somewhere in the visual cortex, and you and your colleagues in the visual cortex send out likes to friends depending on what your connections like. Your likes go through friends, friends of friends, and so on. Somewhere up in the frontal cortex, we imagine that there are two nerve cells; let's call them Lars and Hans. When either Lars or Hans gets enough likes compared to the other, the decision is made to either go right or left.

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