How complex are cells, tissue and organs?

[nec209]

Just how complex are the human body cells, tissue and organs? What is the best way to visualize the complexity of human body cells, tissue and organs? Are cells like ultra small factories and organs like ultra small cities if one is to visualize the complexity or is it more complex than that?

 

 

 

 

[CharonY]

Generally speaking these simplification do not do the complexity real justice. Every single cell has more different processes going on in parallel than even the most complex factory. Thinking about scope, we got about 30-ish trillion cells in our body.  I.e. if you equated one cell with one factory, our body would be the the equivalent of 30 trillion factories. In the world there are only about 10 million factories. Or compare it to the about 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way. These are orders of magnitude off. 

Our brain alone has about 80-ish billion neurons and roughly a similar number of glial cells so whatever scale you are thinking about, you likely have to expand it by a fair bit more.

 

 

[Ken Fabian]

I find the visualizations of cells and biochemistry fascinating. Something like this gives a good overview -

 

[nec209]

It seems there are still cells they are discovering in the human body today.

The ambitious quest to map every cell in our body

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220727-the-ambitious-quest-to-map-every-cell-in-our-body
 

[CharonY]

It is also a bit misleading, as cell types are not fixed an can become different things at different times. Mapping is a snapshot in time, but if want to understand functions, we also need to understand the underlying dynamics (for starters).

[Call me L]

On 11/14/2023 at 12:24 AM, CharonY said:

Generally speaking these simplification do not do the complexity real justice. Every single cell has more different processes going on in parallel than even the most complex factory. Thinking about scope, we got about 30-ish trillion cells in our body.  I.e. if you equated one cell with one factory, our body would be the the equivalent of 30 trillion factories. In the world there are only about 10 million factories. Or compare it to the about 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way. These are orders of magnitude off. 

Our brain alone has about 80-ish billion neurons and roughly a similar number of glial cells so whatever scale you are thinking about, you likely have to expand it by a fair bit more.

 

 

Is there any facts or studies on that neurons analyze themselves? 

[iNow]

4 hours ago, Call me L said:

Is there any facts or studies on that neurons analyze themselves? 

The question doesn’t make sense bc analysis isn’t something individual neurons can do, so no. They can’t. 

[AIkonoklazt]

On 11/15/2023 at 10:57 AM, CharonY said:

It is also a bit misleading, as cell types are not fixed an can become different things at different times. Mapping is a snapshot in time, but if want to understand functions, we also need to understand the underlying dynamics (for starters).

Agreed. Even if there are definable functions (which are inevitably underdetermined) the contributive behavior can constantly change:

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

Quote

What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.

Think how difficult this problem is. To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. (In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, the neuroscientist Kenneth Miller suggested it will take ‘centuries’ just to figure out basic neuronal connectivity.)

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ten-thousand-neurons-linked-behaviors-fly

Quote

    “…some neuron groups could elicit multiple behaviors across animals or sometimes even in a single animal.

    Stimulating a single group of neurons in different animals occasionally resulted in different behaviors. That difference may be due to a number of things, Zlatic says: “It could be previous experience; it could be developmental differences; it could be somehow the personality of animals; different states that the animals find themselves in at the time of neuron activation.”

    Stimulating the same neurons in one animal would occasionally result in different behaviors, the team found.”

 

[StringJunky]

42 minutes ago, iNow said:

The question doesn’t make sense bc analysis isn’t something individual neurons can do, so no. They can’t. 

By 'neurons', they could have meant the whole neuronal ensemble. Best for them to clarify.

[iNow]

20 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

By 'neurons', they could have meant the whole neuronal ensemble. Best for them to clarify.

Covered when they asked the exact same thing over here 

 

[StringJunky]

43 minutes ago, iNow said:

Covered when they asked the exact same thing over here 

 

Okidoki.

[nec209]

9 hours ago, Call me L said:

Is there any facts or studies on that neurons analyze themselves? 

What do you mean by how neurons analyze them self?