Page 175 - The Miracle of Hormones

magine that you are walking bare-foot in your
kitchen and you walk on a piece of glass. The
I amount of time from when you walk on the glass
until you feel the pain in your brain is only a few thou-
sandths of a second. This time is so short that you can-
not notice it, but during this time, a message was
transmitted from your toe to your brain. This rapid and
perfect communication was managed by nerve cells or,
as they are called in biology, neurons.
Just look around: everything we see is designed
according to a special purpose. For example, a tele-
phone with its plastic and electronic parts, buttons, line
and other components, has been designed to establish
communication with other people. In the same way,
the reason for the creation of neurons is evident on
first inspection. (Of course, this requires an inspection
done under an advanced microscope.) The first thing
you notice, along with the other organelles in the
cells, is the special extensions on the neurons which
resemble arms projecting from a body; these are
called axons and dendrites. It is possible to compare
a neuron with a high technology telephone central.
The size of this cellular telephone central is only be-
tween 0.004 and 0.1 of a millimeter, but its commu-
nication mechanism is unparalleled in the world
today. The axon and dendrites mentioned above
provide the communications lines that enable
communication with other sites.
The diameter of a neuron is on ten microns
on average. (A micron is equal to one thou-
sandth of a millimeter) If we could arrange the
100 billion neurons in the human brain side