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Axonal Competition for Neurotrophins

ken collins kenpc at banet.net
Sat May 22 17:06:57 EST 1999


my view on your selected problem is that there is such
"competition", but that it cannot be understood via a
purely-neurochemical approach.

the "competition" is founded in the global neuroanatomy.

it can be easily understood as follows:

if a nervous system converges upon neural activation that results
in the manifestation of behavior that "agrees" with all
environmental inputs, that neural activation "state" will,
=necessarily=, be relatively more-ordered than will a neural
activation "state" that does not (and to the degree that it does
not) "agree" with all environmental inputs.

what do i mean by such "agreement"?

consider a simple example... an individual gets up in the middle
of the night for a midnight snack... he stubs his right great
toe... the "pain" inherent will elevate the degree of neural
activation that's occuring in the individual's nervous system...
this will result in there being relatively more neural activation
in the "competitive zone" in question... more neural activation,
less NGFs to go around, hence, less NGFs-"confirmation" of the
neural activation that led to the stubbing of the toe... the
neural activation did not "agree" with the environmental inputs.

Get it?

although these dynamics are most prominent during early
development, they endure throughout Life.

it's very profitable to take this view with respect to the global
neuroanatomy. when one does so, one immediately sees, clearly,
that the Geometry of the global neuroanatomy has, itself,
thoroughly integrated the simple principles stated above, so that
they exist as the overriding rationale for the final wiring up of
the entirety of the global neuroanatomy.

furthermore, by taking things down to the "level" of
Thermodynamics, the Same-Stuff can be traced all the way into the
genetic material.

K. P. Collins (ken)

[P.S. thus far, i've nothing but respect for Neuroscience at
Edinburgh. kpc]

Arjen van Ooyen wrote:
> 
> NEW PAPER:
> 
> Competition for Neurotrophic Factor in
> the Development of Nerve Connections
> 
> A. van Ooyen & D. J. Willshaw
> Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. (1999) 266: 883-892.
> 
> Download full text from the following website:
> 
>   http://www.cns.ed.ac.uk/people/arjen/competition.html

[...]



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