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

Authority Opinions

Einstein was a great man in science and a very great man in mathematics, but when he got out of his field of competence, which he often did, the result was pathetic. In an article written expressly for the New York Times magazine he said, “It is, therefore, easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.” The statement is thoroughly false. Indeed, modern science was nourished by the church and by the institutions founded by the church. This includes Princeton University, where Einstein was living when he wrote the article. What this shows is that a man need not be trusted in one field merely because of his competence in another.

D. Elton Trueblood
Philosophy of Religion