so what do you call neurons that fire on their own?
I think the brain is a deterministic system, nothing is truly random and it only seems random at the level of abstraction / of the observer. If you drill down deep enough you will discover the underlying mechanisms. So Neurons in the human brain never actually fire on their own, it may not be obvious to the observer/ researcher but they are firing to a stimulus (or lack of) of some kind.
The environment a neuron resides in does seem extremely noisy, if you single out a neuron or group without understanding the context of their receptive fields and communication protocols.
Time for an analogy… If you stand at a busy intersection/ junction on any road, looking at the passing traffic it seems very busy/ data noisy, can you figure out what each person is doing or where they are going?... they must be doing something, going some where, can you figure out the local economy from this single small data point.
Neuroscientists have the same problem, that’s why they are striving to monitor larger groups of neurons, the problem they are going to hit however is that some of those cars are travelling to local destinations, some however are just passing through on a journey of hundreds of miles.
My point being that just because a Neuron seems to fire sporadically/ randomly, it doesn’t mean it is not responding to a stimulus.
It's like those thoughts in the morning that pop up
The process is not random. A thought is a culmination/ compounding of many smaller facets. In other words things only seem to pop into your head because you are not consciously aware of the underlying, sub conscious mechanisms driving/ guiding your consciousness.
Everything is influencing your decisions, the time, the temperature, your body, experience, previous repetition (episodic memories), prediction, etc so many variables. If you were to get out of bed and stand on a Lego… the thought of working on your AI would be the last thing to pop into your head.
This is another way a brain is very different to a computer. A computer has functions, sub routines, single algorithms for doing single jobs. With the brain however each function is a blending derived from the summation of hundreds of smaller similar functions doing a similar job.
So a single finger joint muscle does not just have one network governing it, it might have ten, all slightly different taking information from different sources, each driving sets of fibres within the same muscle. Ever get the shakes after a night on the booze? Basically some of the many networks that control your hands are out of sync… still drunk… hence the course movements/ shakes.
Every so often I like to remind readers that any information I impart is based on my current understanding of main stream academic research, and is often adjusted/ updated with both personal insights and findings through my research. A** coverage lol.
