Page 130 - Consciousness in the Cell

CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE CELL

THE WORLD'S MOST COMPLEX NETWORK

LIES IN OUR BRAIN

With the aid of the perfect structures in the human brain, we
have the ability to perform a number of tasks at the same time. For
example, you can drive a car while at the same time working with
the dials on the cassette player and being in control of the steering
wheel. Even though you are doing a number of things at once, you
do not crash into the car on the road in front. While controlling the
accelerator with your feet, still you can understand exactly what is
being reported on the news broadcast on the radio. You can con-
tinue a conversation with a passenger where you left off. In short,
you can perform a good number of different things simultaneous-
ly thanks to your brain's extraordinary capacity.
Facilitating this cooperation is the interdependence of the
brain's nerve cells, which number about 10 billion. Some 100 tril-
lion connections facilitate communication among these cells. In
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton explains just how
huge a number 100 trillion really is:
15
Numbers in the order of 10 are of course completely beyond
comprehension. Imagine an area about half the 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 leaves in the for-
15
est would be 10 , equivalent to the number of connections in the
human brain.
The extraordinary character of our brain does not end with the
sheer number of its neural connections, because every one of the
100 trillion is in the exact place where it's needed. If even one of
these connections were in the wrong spot, there would be a fault
in this network, with very grave consequences. But this does not

128