Book. It is not one, nor two, but three books in one offered by Denis Le Bihan, doctor, physicist and brain specialist. The first two are pedagogical and dense presentations on the functioning of our brain, which is hardly surprising, and on general relativity, which is more surprising. The third uses the first two to develop and make the reader understand an original and audacious theory, supposed to describe the global functioning of our brain.
The latter was published in 2020 but, by the admission of its author, the book is a more accessible vector than the research article, in which it goes “even further”. The general idea of the work is to describe the brain, its neurons and its connections, like a space-time, in the way Einstein described the galaxies and the light rays between them, the first bending space and forcing the latter to follow these deformations. For Denis Le Bihan, in short, the activity of certain regions “bends” the cerebral connectome – all the nerve connections -, just as the masses bend space-time, to the point of “bringing together” or “distancing » zones, which would explain certain neurological disorders.
But it is not the pile of gray matter that moves, it is in fact a deformation linked to different arrival times of information, coming from several regions. At a given instant, the activated zones seen by an outside observer (with an MRI for example) may be different from the zones actually having an action on a particular region, because of these different travel times.
Speed of information flow
This result, very briefly summarized here, is more than an analogy. The physicist indeed proposes equations directly taken from Einstein’s approach, where the limiting speeds of information circulation play the role of the speed of light in general relativity. This new vision stems from this, from which the researcher would like to deduce that mental states (consciousness, unconsciousness, dysfunction, etc.) correspond to very specific landscapes of connectivity.
Like any model, one of the advantages is that it can describe phenomena differently, or even make predictions. Thus schizophrenia is seen, in this approach, as a defect in the space-time of the connectome, leading to disconnections between regions usually connected in a normal subject. The model also gave him the idea of waking up an anesthetized rat by modifying the connectome locally to force the reconnection of other regions.
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