How is the brain wired?

Our brain works like a high performing, multi-agent engineering system, says Sri Sarma, PhD, a biomedical engineer and Johns Hopkins University professor. She explains how our neurons collect information and communicate.

Transcript

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SRI SARMA: If I were to make an analogy to, say, an engineering system and how our brain works as sort of this highly engineered, high performing system,

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I would think multi-agent systems. So this is modern engineering. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Let's think of a battlefield. We can deploy multiple robots on this battlefield. Each robot is an agent that is sensing information.

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So it carries these sensors and is able to sense information at least locally around its environment.

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So each individual agent will send some information. It can be noisy, however they can communicate that with its neighbors.

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So agents locally around that agent. And so as this sort of network of agents

00:50

are collecting information, sensing the environment, they have to make local decisions in order to meet some kind of global objective.

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So you have this highly networked communication control system that has some global objective, which

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is make sure we're safe, for example, make sure we don't get attacked. We attack before we get attacked thing.

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So I view the brain very similarly. We have neurons or population neurons, which we can consider agents.

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Each neuron has his or her own job, senses certain information about our environment. And what is the whole brain's global objective?

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Maybe at the end of the day, I want to go pick up a glass of water and drink it. But I'm going to gather multiple information

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about my environment so how I can execute that very seamlessly. So I view this as this highly-complicated, multi-agent

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network system. [AUDIO LOGO]