The speed of brain communication uncovered! Don’t be left behind!

Hey, my friends! Have you ever wondered how fast information travels in our brain? Well, it turns out that scientists have discovered something mind-blowing. The speed of communication in our bogeyman keeps accelerating even after early adolescence! We know that anxiety, depression, and other disorders can appear in late adolescence and early adulthood. But understanding how our brains develop can help doctors treat these little problems!

According to Dora Hermes, a scientist at the Mayo Clinic, knowing the trajectory of our developing brains can help doctors find the perfect time to offer therapies to their patients. It’s like they are experts in building mental highways! The human connectome, which is like the highway system of our brain, develops as we grow. But how does that growth affect the speed of signals in our coconut? They explain it to us with a simple example: imagine that a truck travels along a highway, because the same happens with the signals that travel between the different areas of our brain, their speed depends on how the neural highways are built. How crazy!

To find out more, the team of scientists did cool experiments. Imagine that! They stimulated electrodes on the heads of 74 participants aged 4 to 51 years. And no, it wasn’t to play music, it was to measure the time it takes for signals to travel from one region of the brain to another! The surprise was huge! It turns out that signals in the brain of adults travel twice as fast as in children, and what’s more, adults in their 30s and 40s have faster transmission speeds than teenagers. How great it is to be an adult!

To give you an idea, transmission speed is measured in milliseconds, which are like tiny flashes of time. For example, it takes a 4-year-old toddler about 45 milliseconds for a signal to travel from the forehead to the back of the brain. But it only takes a 38-year-old man 20 milliseconds! It’s faster than blinking! Now scientists are investigating how neurological diseases affect the rate of transmission in the brain. It’s like they’re fixing the roads when there’s really bad traffic! They are working with neurosurgeons and pediatric neurologists to understand how diseases can change the rate of transmission compared to normal for each age group.

And that’s all, my friends! Now you know a little more about the speed of communication in our brain. I hope you liked this amazing trip through the highways of our minds!