"The team used algebraic topology, a branch of mathematics used to describe the properties of objects and spaces regardless of how they change shape. They found that groups of neurons connect into 'cliques', and that the number of neurons in a clique would lead to its size as a high-dimensional geometric object.
"We found a world that we had never imagined," says lead researcher,neuroscientist Henry Markram from the EPFL institute in Switzerland.
"There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to 11 dimensions.""
Ack, that's so cool.
I'm interpreting this to mean that these networks vary across 7 variables, perhaps things like time, brain state (ex. sleep vs. wake), neurotransmitter use,...
FB: "When researchers gave their virtual brain tissue a stimulus, they saw that neurons were reacting to it in a highly organised manner.
"It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building [and] then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc," says one of the team, mathematician Ran Levi from Aberdeen University in Scotland."
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