Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

The information processing capabilities of the brain are often reported to reside in the trillions of connections that wire its neurons together.

But over the past few decades, mounting research has quietly shifted some of the attention to individual neurons.

They seem to shoulder much more computational responsibility than once seemed imaginable.

The latest in a long line of evidence about individual neurons comes from scientists' discovery of a new type of electrical signal

in the upper layers of the human cortex. Laboratory and modeling studies have already shown that

tiny compartments in the dendritic arms of cortical neurons can each perform complicated

operations in mathematical logic. But now it seems that

individual dendritic compartments can also perform a particularly tricky computation, exclusive

or. Mathematical theorists had previously categorized this as unsolvable by single neuron systems.

Albert Giedon is a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin.

He's the first author of the paper that presented these findings in science earlier this year.

I think it's safe to say that. I believe that you're just scratching the

surface of what these neurons are really doing. We still don't understand what they are really doing

these neurons. I understand a lot. Don't get me wrong. There was these huge bogus in neuroscience,

huge. But the level of single neurons, we still have to learn what it exactly does.

The discovery marks a growing need for studies of the nervous system

to consider the implications of individual neurons as extensive information processors.

It means that brains may be an order of magnitude more complicated than we think.

It may also prompt some computer scientists

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