Page 118 - The Miracle of Electricity in the Body

116 THE MIRACLE OF ELECTRICITY IN THE BODY

The Flawless Communications Infrastructure

of Our Brains
The 100 billion cells in the brain and their extensions can be com-
pared to a network that pervades every point in the human body. This
network collects messages arriving from all over the body and forwards
them to the brain, establishing flawless communication between brain
and body. Thanks to this link, there is never any interruption inside the
nervous system. And again thanks to this flawless structure, you can
easily adjust the dials on the car radio while driving, as well as maintain-
ing control over the steering wheel. You do not hit any oncoming vehi-
cles, despite performing several tasks at once. You can also understand
every word being spoken on the radio, and carry on a conversation from
where you left off. In short, thanks to the brain’s extraordinary capacity,
human beings are able to perform several tasks at the same moment.
Every neuron inside an adult’s brain is connected to around 100,000
nerve extensions. There are some 100 trillion of these connections, which
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permit the great harmony in the brain’s functioning. While city plan-
ners still find it difficult to find a solution to traffic congestion, there is
never any confusion in the communications among the 100 billion neu-
rons. Professor of Biochemistry Michael Denton describes the magni-
tude of the brain’s communications network with this analogy:

Numbers in the order of 10 are of course completely beyond comprehen-
15
sion. Imagine an area about half size of the USA (one million square miles)
covered in a forest of trees containing ten thousand trees per square mile.
If each tree contained one hundred thousand leaves, the total number of
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leaves in the forest would be 10 , equivalent to the number of connections
in the human brain! 66
In her book The Human Brain, Oxford University Professor of
Pharmacology Susan Greenfield, an expert in the field of neurochem-
istry, touches on the number of neural connections:
If we took a piece of brain the size of a match head alone, there could be
up to a billion connections on that surface. Consider just the outer layer of
the brain, the cortex. If you counted the connections between neurons in