Given the recent twirtermania sweeping the nation, I couldn’t help but take A close at the transmission mechanisms built into facebook, MySpace, twitter and some other new communications systems.  The whole process has been very interesting and it has really illustrated to me just how big and profound twitter is as a system for collecting, processing and transmitting information.

One thing that has really stuck with me is the follower/following model that twitter users to distribute information.  I’m struck by how similar that mechanism is to a neuron, and because anyone can follow anyone else the entire twitterverse is in the process of wiring itself up like a big brain.

With Neurons, you have incoming signals travel in through the dendrites.  In twitter, this corresponds to incoming messages coming in from the people you are following.  In the brain, if enough of the incoming neurons “fire”, then the receiving neuron will also fire, transmitting a pulse down to the neurons to which it is connected to.  In twitter, this essentially means that if enough of the people that you are following are tweeting about an idea, then eventually you will start tweeting about it to and the people who follow you will catch word of it and they too may pass it on.

This is how information moves through a brain.  It’s also how information moves through twitter.  It’s why information on the Mumbai terrorist attacks spread around the world in just a few minutes after people started twittering about them.  In fact the “RT” convention for retweeting is precisely this sort of derivative firing.

Just to keep the metaphor going, I think its interesting that some of the most influential twitterers are acting like a sort of sensory organ, constantly scanning the horizon and tweeting away all of the new things they see.  Their followers sort the wheat from the chaffe.   Its not unlike the eyes simply passing along the fact that something looking like a bus is moving quickly towards you.  It’s up to the cerebral cortex to do something about it.

I think Tim o’Reilly (with 100k followers) and Dave Morin (with 150k) are great examples of this.  I wonder if the optic nerve has more neural connections than other parts of the brain?  Anyone?