Seeing red

[bennyboy]

And the question being what effect would that have on the system? It's an interesting question... what would it take to 'break' the neural network?

I wouldn't use the term broken. Interference might break a digital system (it might not anyway), but the brain is what it is, and I wouldn't say that rare events would generally mean a "breaking." I can imagine (and this is just speculation) that you could see epileptics as systems that are sensitive to constructive interference (i.e. harmonics), and that things like spiritual experiences might be, as well.

Anyway, the point of all that was to hopefully understand what could go wrong if a butterfly effect, snowball thingy happened So I was thinking, since the neurons rely on maintaining very specific potential differences and concentration gradients relative to the extra-cellular fluid then I think it would be fair to say that the content of the extracellular fluid must be regulated just as much as it is inside neurons. And for that the blood-brain barrier springs to mind, because it requires active transport of nutrients that it allows through the barrier (which is not everything... not toxins in the bloodstream for instance) via special transport molecules/cells, whatever they may be. So the question is if you've got an edge case where say all neurons are either in the resting state or in the fully excited state, what would be the situation in the extracellular fluid?

That would be like having every start in the galaxy line up, I suppose.

As for your question to both of us, about pulling neurons 1-by-1, I really don't know I'm sorry. I think a neural network will always find a way to represent whatever it can, depending on its connectivity, but with decreasing neurons and thus indirectly decreasing connectivity, the scope of the representations would reduce. But how to translate that into stable or variable I don't know... I think it would always be pretty stable whatever size it was but I don't really know what you mean.

I suppose my question is whether adding more members adds a statistical balancing force that will never be disrupted (like the QM particles in my table never "spiking" and causing it to light on fire or something), or whether the increased complexity adds to the chance of a rogue wave-type situation where SOMETIMES remarkable things will happen as a gazillion discrete events just happen to line up.