[throwup238]

The vast majority of the chemical processes in a single cell are concerned with maintaining homeostasis for that cell - just keeping it alive, well fed with ATP, and repairing the cell walls. We don't need to simulate them.

[glial]

> We don't need to simulate them.

You might be right, but this is the kind of hubris that is often embarrassing in hindsight. Like when Aristotle thought the brain was a radiator.

[throwup238]

If you have any evidence to the contrary, I would love to hear it because it would upend biology and modern medicine as we know it and we'd both win a Nobel prize.

As long as it's modern scientific evidence and not a 2,300 year old anecdote, of course.

[glial]

The role of astrocytes in neural computation is an example. For a long time, the assumption was that astrocytes were just "maintenance" or structural cells (the name "glia" comes from "glue"). Thus, they were not included in computational models. More recently, there is growing recognition that they play an important role in neural computation, e.g. https://picower.mit.edu/discoveries/key-roles-astrocytes

[throwup238]

The first several sentences from your article:

> Neurons do not work alone. Instead, they depend heavily on non-neuronal or “glia” cells for many important services including access to nutrition and oxygen, waste clearance, and regulation of the ions such as calcium that help them build up or disperse electric charge.

That's exactly what homeostatisis is but we don't simulate astrocyte mitochondria to understand what effect they have on another neuron's activation. They are independent. Otherwise, biochemistry wouldn't function at all.

[glial]

Sure, but if you continue:

> they showed in live, behaving animals that they could enhance the response of visual cortex neurons to visual stimulation by directly controlling the activity of astrocytes.

Perhaps we're talking past each other, but I thought you were implying that since some function supports homeostasis, we can assume it doesn't matter to a larger computation, and don't need to model it. That's not true with astrocytes, and I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that other biological functions (like "junk DNA") fall into that category as well.

[throwup238]

> Perhaps we're talking past each other, but I thought you were implying that since some function supports homeostasis, we can assume it doesn't matter to a larger computation, and don't need to model it. That's not true with astrocytes, and I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that other biological functions (like "junk DNA") fall into that category as well.

I was only referring to the internal processes of a cell. We don't need to simulate 90+% of the biochemical processes in a neuron to get an accurate simulation of that neuron - if we did it'd pretty much fuck up our understanding of every other cell because most cells share the same metabolic machinery.

The characteristics of the larger network and which cells are involved is an open question in neuroscience and it's largely an intractable problem as of this time.