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15.1

Modular Construction Leads to Ever New

Properties – Up to Consciousness

Bioinformatically, we can go through these stages in order. First, we have the genome. But

what is important is the concrete inventory of mRNA in a nerve cell. Even at this level,

there is much to discover and analyse. In this context, there is, for example, interesting

work that shows how strong experiences also change the brain in its regulation, i.e. epigen­

etic regulation, via the peptide abundance in nerve cells or how, for example, the synaptic

circuitry in individual synapses functions (although model organisms are often used here)

(Hassouna et al. 2016). In short, the analysis of large amounts of genomic and transcrip­

tomic data is of great help here.

The next level concerns individual neuronal circuits, with patterns forming through a

juxtaposition of inhibitory and activatory circuits. It should be emphasized here that ini­

tially such pattern formations are important for the neuronal differentiation and emergence

of the individual brain region. These two processes can be well reproduced with semi­

quantitative dynamic models and Boolean models (see Chap. 5).

The next higher level concerns the formation of individual brain tissues, for example

the primary visual cortex or the hippocampus. Here we can already describe a lot. However,

much is not yet understood, e.g. how the final perception of optical images occurs. Equally

not understood are the fabulous properties of the hippocampus to give events time stamps

and thus make us a person with our own biography and memories. One’s own bioinformat­

ics work only helps here by evaluating data and getting the statistics right. Since more,

more complex and deeper experiments are needed here, this complex and high level is

clearly the domain of experimental neurobiology. However, bioinformatics can help here

mainly by evaluating and interpreting complex data.

1985

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15.1

How exactly the information is processed in the cerebrum, nobody knows at the

moment. It is clear, however, that in addition to serial information processing, more global

processing and not local information is processed (detailed analysis in our own preprint:

15  How Is Our Own Extremely Powerful Brain Constructed?