The Brain: Complex Beyond Belief

The human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth. And for the first time, researchers are getting a peek at what they do. Even though the brain’s synapses are less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter, scientists at Stanford have pieced together pictures of one to create a three-dimensional image (see the video below). The senior author of the paper explaining the study, Stephen Smith, says the brain's complexity is beyond anything they'd imagined, almost “beyond belief.” The brain has hundreds of trillions of synapses connecting some 200 billion nerve cells. To put it in perspective, if the synapses just in the cerebral cortex were stars, they would fill 1500 Milky Way galaxies. Details of the study are in the Journal Neuron.

Stephen Goforth