The spatiotemporal neuronal operation is too complex and fast to enable a sufficiently detailed and accurate observation of neuronal operation. Given that the action potential involves rapid changes in membrane potential, the genial idea (originally introduced by Cole and Curtis [43]) applied by Hodgkin and Huxley [9] was to slow down (actually to ”freeze”) its dynamics by the ”voltage clamp” device, which can set the membrane’s potential at a particular voltage and keep it there, using electrical stimulation and feedback. This advantage of the method is its disadvantage at the same time. First, since it uses purely electric stimulation and feedback, it suggests that the stimulated operation is also purely electrical, hiding that it is a thermoelectric process (and it is accompanied by mechanical changes). Second, it enables experimenting with ”snapshots” of the operation (the feedback fixes the neuron’s voltage, in a frozen state, to a particular value), hiding that the operation is dynamic and needs a dynamic description by laws of motion. Third, the feedback the method uses means introducing ’foreign’ (external), time-dependent current into the cell, is not in their equations.
The method has enabled them to gain an initial understanding of what was happening in the neuron at each stage of the action potential. Correspondingly, they have set up a classic predictive description (a very precise set of observations, in the form of mathematical equations), describing purely electrical static processes. Although they correctly determined that an influx of sodium ions through voltage-gated sodium ion channels causes a rapid shift in membrane potential, which causes the initiation of the electrical signal that is known as the action potential, their picture (which, in their opinion, ”the interpretation given is unlikely to provide a correct picture of the membrane”) could not accurately describe the observations, especially their timing relations.
The main goal of the BRAIN initiative was ”observing their [the neural system’s] dynamic patterns of activity as the circuit functions in vivo during behavior, and perturbing these patterns to test their significance”. [27] This method is exactly equivalent with the predictive Ptolemaic system (or at most with Kepler’s law) for describing planetal motion, that lacked the (Newtonian) laws of motion. The “natural” expectation for the paths of celestial bodies was that they must travel in uniform motion along the most “perfect” path possible. It presumed ”perfect” circles (without reasoning) for planetary orbits and adapted them to the real-world planetary orbits by perturbing them (without reasoning why that perturbation occurs), instead of discovering their laws of motion and understanding that they are ellipses. Ptolemy’s model explained the observed “imperfection” by postulating that irregular movements were due to a combination of several regular circular motions (”perturbation”) and introducing ad hoc spheres. The idea of the ”perfect path” had to be replaced with ”Newton’s law of universal gravitation”. At first glance, that universal law, without solving its differential equation, has no relation to the ideal path.
”Central to the BRAIN Initiative is the discovery, development, and dissemination of new theories”. [27] However, there is no project to validate the principles used in the so-called theoretical descriptions. Neuroscience theory remained static, forming a fundamental obstacle to understanding the dynamic operation of neural systems. This is precisely why a new perspective must be introduced. The static view means that by measuring technologies such as clamping or freezing means that we forcefully prevent the gradients from changing, which change is the life itself. That view enables us to study fine details of samples taken from living materials that themselves do not live (in the sense of activity they do in their native state), and hides that they have internal forces which move them according to their laws of motion; furthermore, that such laws exist. Measuring electrical activity in a living system affects its electrical (and, through this, chemical) behavior.
We must also defy existing ideas and notions, shortly discuss why they show some initial successes and why they lead to wrong conclusions; furthermore, introduce new ideas (why we must combine electricity and thermodynamics (as well as mechanical changes) instead of using them side by side in physiology; why do we need to revisit physical principles to handle interactions with different speeds; which rules are valid when combining phenomena of the boundary of microscopic and macroscopic worlds; what is the true abstract operating principle of neurons; why information has a different meaning and needs different handling in technical and biological implementations).