Do neurons by themselves, take decisions? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Do neurons by themselves make decisions? That depends on how abstract you consider the term “decision” here. Neurons aren’t ‘smart’ in any way. As cells they are complex and there’s a lot we still find out to this day, but we can simplify things for now.

A neuron does its thing, much like your heart does its thing. Your heart doesn’t ‘decide’ to beat, it gets the signal and the muscles contract. There’s a neat mechanism in place where the action potential is transformed into muscle movement, but at no point is a decision necessary, it all works as it should.

Let’s imagine a neuron is like a rube Goldberg machine. It constantly get’s an influx of signal, but these aren’t strong enough to affect the neuron as a whole. The signal will make it a tiny bit more positive, but it quickly dies out. In the picture below that would be like tiny tugs on the fish-line (A) that aren’t strong enough to tip over the teapot (B).

When the neuron receives a strong enough signal, or enough small signals from multiple sources, then it’s go time. This sets in motion a chain of events like in our Rube Goldberg machine. The teapot tips over and one thing affects the next and there’s no stopping it.

In a neuron this is mainly due to voltage gated channels. These channels open up when the relative charge is at a specific level, when enough signals come in it will trigger the channel. More ions rush in making the local area more positive, triggering the next, and the next, and the next…. and off is our neural rube Goldberg machine.

The neuron doesn’t make this decision, it merely acts out the mechanism, following physics and biology. The neuron cannot stop this or trigger this at will, the neuron has no mind and it doesn’t think. A neuron is just a cell, a cool and special cell, but just a cell nonetheless.

It is curious how the immense network of these cells work together and result in “us”. What causes this subjective experience… we don’t know yet. But we can see that the network, the interaction between neurons, is more than the sum of its individual components. Even in the relative simple neural networks we simulate on computers it can occur that the network becomes sufficiently complex that features emerge that go beyond the individual components. Let’s attribute that to the power of teamwork eh?

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Photo Credit: Maciej Frolow/Getty Images