# The Nervous System Runs on Information: Understanding Your Body’s Ultimate Network
The human nervous system is arguably the most sophisticated information processing network on Earth. Every sensation you feel, every thought you think, and every movement you make depends on the seamless flow of information through billions of neural pathways. To truly understand how we function as conscious beings, we must recognize that our nervous system is fundamentally an information system—one that rivals any computer network in its complexity and elegance.
## The Language of Neurons: Information as Electrical Currency
At its most basic level, the nervous system communicates through electrical and chemical signals. When you touch a hot surface, specialized receptors in your skin don’t simply “feel” heat—they convert thermal energy into electrical impulses, encoding information about temperature, location, and intensity. This information then travels at speeds up to 120 meters per second along nerve fibers to your spinal cord and brain.
What’s remarkable is that all neural information, whether it represents the scent of coffee, the memory of your first kiss, or the complex motor commands needed to ride a bicycle, is encoded using the same basic currency: action potentials. These electrical spikes, lasting mere milliseconds, form the universal language of the nervous system.
## Pattern Recognition: How Information Becomes Meaning
The magic happens not in individual neurons, but in the patterns of their connections and firing sequences. Your brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, each connected to thousands of others, creating a network with more possible connection patterns than there are atoms in the observable universe. This astronomical complexity allows for the emergence of consciousness, creativity, and abstract thought from simple electrical impulses.
Consider vision as an example. When light hits your retina, it’s converted into patterns of neural firing that represent edges, colors, and movements. These information patterns flow through increasingly sophisticated processing centers, where they’re compared against stored memories, combined with emotional associations, and integrated with information from other senses. The result is not just “seeing” but understanding—recognizing your grandmother’s face in a crowd or appreciating the beauty of a sunset.
## Memory: Information Storage and Retrieval
Your memories aren’t stored like files on a computer hard drive. Instead, they exist as patterns of synaptic connections—the spaces between neurons where information is transmitted. Each time you recall a memory, you’re essentially recreating the pattern of neural activity that originally encoded that experience. This is why memories can change over time; each act of remembering is also an act of rewriting.
The efficiency of this biological information storage system is staggering. While a typical computer might store a gigabyte of data on a chip the size of a fingernail, your brain stores what’s estimated to be equivalent to millions of gigabytes in a space barely larger than your two fists combined. Moreover, this storage system is self-organizing, constantly optimizing itself based on what information is most frequently accessed and deemed important.
## The Information Superhighway: Neural Networks in Action
The nervous system operates multiple information processing streams simultaneously. Right now, as you read these words, your brain is processing visual information from the text, maintaining your balance and posture, regulating your breathing and heartbeat, monitoring your environment for potential threats, and accessing stored knowledge to understand the concepts being presented. All of this happens seamlessly because information flows through specialized neural networks, each optimized for specific types of processing.
Your spinal cord serves as the primary information highway, carrying sensory data up to the brain and motor commands down to muscles. But it’s not merely a passive conduit—it also processes information locally, enabling reflexes that can respond to danger in milliseconds, faster than conscious thought.
## Plasticity: The System That Rewrites Itself
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the nervous system’s information processing is its plasticity—its ability to reorganize itself based on experience. Every time you learn something new, neural pathways are strengthened, weakened, or created entirely. This means your brain is literally physically different today than it was yesterday, shaped by the information it has processed.
This plasticity extends beyond learning. When areas of the brain are damaged, other regions can sometimes take over their functions, essentially rewiring the information processing network. Blind individuals often develop enhanced auditory processing capabilities, with brain areas normally dedicated to vision being recruited for sound analysis. This demonstrates that the nervous system’s information processing is not rigidly fixed but dynamically adaptable.
## The Information Theory of Consciousness
Modern neuroscience increasingly views consciousness itself as an emergent property of information integration. Consciousness may arise when information from various brain regions is successfully integrated into a unified, coherent experience. This integrated information theory suggests that consciousness isn’t located in any single brain region but emerges from the complex patterns of information flow throughout the nervous system.
This perspective has profound implications for our understanding of disorders of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and even the nature of free will. If consciousness is fundamentally about information processing, then understanding these information flows becomes crucial to understanding ourselves.
## Implications for Health and Enhancement
Recognizing the nervous system as an information processing network opens new avenues for maintaining and enhancing neural health. Just as we can optimize computer networks, we can potentially optimize our neural networks through targeted interventions.
Physical exercise enhances information processing by promoting the growth of new neural connections and improving the efficiency of existing ones. Mental challenges, like learning new skills or solving complex problems, strengthen the neural networks involved in cognition. Even meditation can be understood as a practice of optimizing information flow, reducing noise and enhancing signal clarity in neural networks.
Sleep becomes crucial not just for rest, but for information consolidation—the process by which the day’s experiences are integrated into long-term memory networks. During deep sleep, the brain essentially performs maintenance on its information systems, clearing metabolic waste and strengthening important neural pathways while weakening others.
## The Future of Neural Information Processing
As we develop better tools for measuring and manipulating neural information flow, we’re entering an era where we might directly interface with the nervous system’s information networks. Brain-computer interfaces already allow paralyzed individuals to control robotic limbs through thought alone, essentially tapping into the motor command information streams of the nervous system.
Future developments might allow us to enhance memory formation, accelerate learning, or even directly share information between brains. While such possibilities raise important ethical questions, they also highlight just how fundamentally the nervous system operates as an information processing system.
## Conclusion: Information as the Essence of Experience
Understanding that the nervous system runs on information transforms our perspective on human experience. Every emotion, every memory, every moment of awareness emerges from the complex interplay of information patterns flowing through neural networks. We are, in essence, walking, talking information processing systems—biological computers of extraordinary sophistication.
This realization doesn’t diminish the richness of human experience; rather, it reveals the incredible complexity and beauty underlying our consciousness. The fact that patterns of electrical activity can give rise to love, creativity, wonder, and self-awareness represents one of the universe’s most remarkable achievements.
By appreciating the nervous system as an information network, we gain insights not only into how we function but also into how we might enhance our capabilities, treat neurological disorders, and perhaps even understand the deepest questions about consciousness and identity. In the end, we are the information we process, the patterns we maintain, and the networks we nurture—living embodiments of information in its most beautiful and complex form.
