Neural code breakers: what language do neurons use to communicate?
A Paris bistro, along the sidewalks of Montmartre. A bespectacled man, a woman in a shawl. Before them, two crystal glasses, a basket of bread, a bottle of wine. He reaches for a piece of bread, refills her glass, replaces the bottle. What could be simpler? Two people enjoying the evening and a fine Merlot. Yet behind the scenes, within the communication channels of their bodies, a set of silent, surreptitious conversations makes this rendezvous possible. This is the chatter of their nervous systems, which are busy signaling, processing, and relaying information back and forth among a trillion neurons. Sensory systems capture and encode the raw pictures and sensations of their surroundings, then dispatch that information as electric pulses through neural pathways to the brain. There, after cerebral circuits collate and process those signals, a plan emerges. The brain issues commands for action. A sequence of electric signals pulses through the neurological network back down to the body
