The Edge of a Knife
Journal Title: Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research (BJSTR) - Year 2018, Vol 19, Issue 4
Abstract
Nature is an extremely competitive place. In order to survive living creatures, need to respond fast enough to harmful changes or attacks. For this purpose, natural evolution has armed organisms with various efficient mechanisms enabling sensitive, fast enough and selective responses. One of such relatively simple mechanism is to tune a system close to a relevant phase transition taking place in a medium or a system’s organisation. At a phase transition, a system is in general anomalously strongly responsive because the steepness of the corresponding local “energy landscape” is relatively low. Consequently, strong fluctuations in a relevant field describing the system’s organisation are possible. For example, a flock of flying birds can be roughly modeled by an Ising-type field, describing their collective orientational order [1]. Analysis of fluctuations in the flock ordering field, which are triggered by a predator attack or some other reasons, reveals that the system is in general just below the phase transition into the disordered phase, in which collective orientational order is absent. Therefore, the proximity of a phase transition arms the system with anomalously strong responsivity using which it could adapt readily to current conditions. Furthermore, by slightly changing a relevant control parameter one could switch between the competing phases of a phase transition, which exhibit qualitatively different properties. For example, such a mechanism might enable information propagation in nerves according to a “mechanical” nerve theory [2,3]. However, this view contradicts the current mainstream belief, which is based on a Nobel Prize awarded Hodgin-Huxley (HH) model [4]. The latter claims that nerve signals in animals and humans are transmitted electrically and models nerves as electrical objects. However, this model fails to explain the impact of anesthetics on sensitivity of nerves. Namely, various anesthetics trigger the same sequence of effects on increasing their dose in living creatures, including, e.g., flies and humans. On increasing the dose anesthetics first silence memory formation, then pain sensation, consciousness… A wide variety of chemically different anesthetics have the same effect, which cannot be explained within the HH-model.
Authors and Affiliations
S Kralj, M Kralj
Keywords
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- EP ID EP622450
- DOI 10.26717/BJSTR.2019.19.003342
- Views 162
- Downloads 0
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