The 'million monkey' scenario is a well-known thought experiment. Supposing a million monkeys were randomly tapping at the keys of a typewriter. Would one of the monkeys eventually happen to type out the text of a Shakespeare play? Over any realistic time scale, it turns out that the probability of them reproducing even one page of Shakespeare is rather small, although given an infinite amount of time (or infinite monkeys), the monkeys would succeed an infinite number of times.
Being a neuroscientist, I wanted to explore what would happen if, instead of monkeys typing, we assumed that random letters were generated by the spike activity of human neurons. Could a neuron be likened to a monkey with a typewriter? And if so, how long would we have to wait before one of the neurons in a human brain 'typed' a given text? Here's how I approached the problem. A neuron ...
