People often think about human behavior in terms of how they perceive things in a shorter time frame, such as what is happening in the present, which includes activities like reading a magazine or a newspaper, riding a bike, or playing baseball. But there are other dimensions of behavior that extend beyond weeks, months, or years. Some of the instances include a kid learning how to read and write or a person turning 50 and keep wondering where all of the time has gone. These changes are not perceived by people on a day-to-day basis. They just suddenly started realizing that they are older, healed, or have acquired a new skill. “The neuroscience field looked at the brain in multiple ways,” said Franco Prestilli, who is a highly-skilled neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin.
As an expert in neuroinformatics, vision science, computational neuroscience, brain imaging, and data science, Pestilli’s research has advanced the understanding of human cognition and brain networks for the past 15 years. He likes to compare the brain to the Internet, a powerful set of computers that are cable-connected that keeps many windows open and run many programs at the same time. When the computer is fine, but the cables are not, remote communication between computers in different parts of the brain begins to fail, causing problems for our long-term behavior. Pestilli and his team are also interested in how biological calculations change over longer periods of time, such as how does brain functioning changes when a person becomes blind. He said that the research showed that if we change the input to the eye, the white matter of the brain changes. The white matter in our brain is equivalent to the cable system of the brain. Our brains have millions of these wires, and they connect the millions of tiny computers in our brain called neurons.
