On Thu, 5 Oct 1995, luksch at zfn.uni-bremen.de (Harald Luksch) wrote to me:
>Dear Stephan,
>I just read your article you have posted on the bionet neuroscience
>newsgroup. I do not want to comment on the general subject, I=B4d just=
> propose
>that you should be a bit more careful with the nomenclature - this thing is
>called hippocampus (after the greek word for the mythological sea horse) and
>neither hypocampus nor hypocalamus. Actually, using words so carelessly
>suggests that you should read literature a bit more carefully or that you
>haven=B4t read too much anyway. Additionally, metaphors like "vacuum" are=
> not
>very sensible to express a neurons state as well.
Here I must disagree with you. Such simplistic language makes it understandable
for a lot of people. The alternative would be that I start to draw a lot of
pictures and that would not only take me a lot of time but also the software
(email and newsgroups) does not provide me with that possibility!
What is so strange about the idea of a neuron being some kind of pump? When a
neuron fires MORE charge is transferred from the dendrite and body to the axon
that was present so that the dendrites will have a negative charge to their
surrounding for a short while making it easier for other attached neurons to
fire. That is the kind of vacuum I was talking about. I think it gives a
rather good idea of what is going on. A far better idea that talking a half
hour about various several neuro transmitters and chemical processes will ever
produce. If people want to know more about that then they can look it up in
books. They surely don't need me for that.
Also have some consideration for the fact that english is NOT my native language
so I am translating all the time for you pleasure. The trouble with this is
that the "same" words in both Dutch and English may in fact not have the precise
same meaning without me be aware of it.
> And another addition, now
>to the subject: Don=B4t you think that you neglect the chemistry and
>pharmacology of the various brain systems, their transmitters and
>modulators, a bit?
To be honest with you: I don't think that there is someone alive today who can
claim to understand all that. I am already happy to be able to understand the
general principles and that is far more then most so called experts can claim.
Besides I am building software systems and am not very much interested in
working on "the real thing". And believe it or not but software has the nice
feature that it either works or you got it wrong and it does work very nicely.
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