Comment on Does the ping between your eyes and brain increase when you're tired?

SincerityIsCool@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• marcos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You’d be surprised. The speed of electrical pulses inside neurons change due to all kinds of factors, like training and diet.

  I do really expect them to change with tiredness too.

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  • Lightfire228@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I would expect that brain processing takes orders of magnitude longer than signal propagation

    So, while you’re probably correct, I’d wager that the brain processing delay drowns out any variances in signal propagation speeda

    (I are computer science, not neuroscience)

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    • marcos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m not a neurologist either, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but it seems that I’ve gone a bit deeper on the rabbit hole.

      AFAIK, “brain processing” seems to be mostly signal propagation. Our brains don’t work anything like the neural networks we use, but it seems to work like some kind of neural network, and “processing” being made by moving signals from one place to another is part of it.

      The one effect of sleep that I know of is exactly the kind of “environmental cleanup” necessary to make the electrical signals move faster. Now, there are certainly lots of other effects I don’t know of, and for all I know the speed could actually be bounded and all that sleep does is to keep it at the boundary. Also, “tired” is a very ambiguous word here. But still, I’d expect it to be important.

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      • Lightfire228@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I think i chose my terms poorly

        In this case, what i meant by “Signal propagation” was purely the time delay from retinal stimulation, to optic nerve, to brain

        And by “brain processing”, i meant “the time it takes from brain receives visual data to you experiencing it”

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  • SincerityIsCool@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Brains are weird so that checks out

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