Written by Grace Fox a Master of Arts in Biblical History and Archaeology student at TBS.
I accepted Jesus as my personal Savior at age six when my mother led me to the Lord at our home in northern Ireland where our family served as missionaries. Through homeschooling, my parents offered unwavering support and proved instrumental in guiding my academic pursuits through the lens of a Biblical worldview.
As I grew in my love for the Creator, I developed a keen interest in exploring His creation. I found science intriguing; appreciated those scientific method of ensuring evidence was observable, testable, and repeatable; and observed ample evidence that science harmonizes with the Bible.
I studied biology as an undergraduate and focused my research on development and regeneration. My doctoral studies centered on neuroscience, mostly investigating learning and memory. I recently shifted my focus from basic sciences to applied work in pharmaceuticals, including evidence synthesis, pricing and reimbursement, and value communication. As part of my continued interests across scientific disciplines, I am currently enrolled in graduate training in biblical archaeology at The Bible Seminary with a goal of leveraging my background in identifying, synthesizing, appraising, and communicating to help further demonstrate the historicity of the Bible.
Of all my research over the years, one project that clearly seemed to declare God's glory involved investigations of cell assembly organization in the brain. Originally published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience in 20161 and revised below, I pray this evidence will strengthen your faith in the Creator.
Amidst the 86 billion cells forming 100 trillion connections in the human brain, cognition emerges. To put this into perspective, imagine a city with 86 billion residents and 100 trillion roads connecting them. This is the level of intricacy and organization in the human brain. We learn, process, and store information from this seemingly random organization of neurons and supporting cells. Owing to this complexity, scientists have long searched for the basic building block of neural circuits—a computational barcode that is repeated throughout cortical and sub-cortical regions.
During the last decade, I was a part of the team that proposed and tested the Theory of Connectivity, a mathematical rule for organizing neural circuits. The theory postulates that within each computational building block or functional connectivity motif (FCM), the number of principal projection cell cliques with distinct inputs should follow a power-of-two-based permutation equation of N = 2i-1. N is the number of distinct neural cliques that can cover all possible permutations and combinations of specific-to-general input patterns, while i is the number of distinct information inputs. With this organization, each FCM can cover every mathematical possibility in a specific-to-general manner.
Using neural recording techniques, our team demonstrated that these activity patterns, or FCMs, are used throughout the brain and across animal species during appetitive, social, and emotional experiences. At last, a unifying design principle for brain computation was found!
A crucial question remained—are these FCMs preconfigured, formed by learning in adulthood, or both? Incredibly, we found that genetic deletion of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor—the synaptic switch for learning and memory—did not greatly impact the FCMs. These results suggested that these activity patterns are developmentally pre-configured or pre-wired by design.
Taken together, these results demonstrated that neural circuits are comprised of pre-wired, conserved FCMs. Instead of random connections that developed accidentally over millions or billions of years of evolution, these data, combined with prior research efforts, show that the brain’s connectivity patterns are highly non-random.
Comments