IUBio

thinking & light

Richard Norman rsnorman at mediaone.net
Sat Feb 19 10:40:42 EST 2000


You are thinking about thinking just a little too simplistically.
"Thought", whatever that may be, is certainly related to brain activity
and we know a lot about the latter.  It has to do with cellular processes
which are quite well understood.

The electrochemical processes that produce nerve potentials are
caused by proteins in the cell membrane changing their shape
slightly.  This process takes tens or hundreds of microseconds.
The nerve potentials themselves take milliseconds.  And the chemical
processes involved in synaptic transmission take several or many
milliseconds to occur.  The speed of conduction of the nerve impulse
down an axon is on the order of 1 to 100 meters/second, nowhere
near the speed of electrical events in a metallic wire.

All in all, one millisecond is fast for an event at the level of a cell.
At the speed of light, the corresponding time scale would be
a nanosecond, a million times faster.


yesum <yesum at ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:88lglh$27h$1 at nntp3.atl.mindspring.net...
> Do the physics of the thought-impulse(s) have any relationship(s) to light
> (or the speed of light) ... or does this photon / consciousness thing
> compare like apples and oranges? ... there is a connection with images and
> light and regions of the brain which excite when seeing -- even just
> thinking about an image excites the "seeing parts" -- yes? ... so how far
> can we carry this relationship (if there is one) with "light" and
"thinking"
> (or "thoughts")?
>
> I hope I'm not too naively exploring the possibilities of physics. Thanks
in
> advance ... pat
>
>






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