Oct 1, 2006
Brain exercise: more brain connections or leaves in the Amazon?
By: Alvaro Fernandez
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Question: What is this? How many do we have? How many connections can each have? |
Answer: According to the London-based Science Museum “Your brain is the hub of your nervous system. It is made up of 100 billion nerve cells – about the same as the number of trees in the Amazon rainforest. Each cell is connected to around 10,000 others. So the total number of connections in your brain is the same as the number of leaves in the rainforest – about 1000 trillion”.
Enjoy the view.
(Credit for pic: Rainbow Studios)
[...] 6. Are there more brain connections or leaves in the Amazon?. [...]
[...] 6. Are there more brain connections or leaves in the Amazon? [...]
Each nerve cell is directly connected to 10,000 other nerve cells? Because all the pictures of nerve cells only show 5-10 connections coming in and out… Maybe they mean “connection” like the connection between NY and LA – thru Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Denver and other nerve cells along the way.
So the answer to the question would then be a question of interpretation. If you go with “direct connections” then there are more leaves in the Amazon…
The link is a 404, btw.
Hello Predman, very good point. Yes, it depends on the definition of “connections”
[...] “Guesstimate”. Are there more leaves in the Amazon rainforest or neuron connections in your brain? (answer). [...]
[...] “Guesstimate”. Are there more leaves in the Amazon rainforest or neuron connections in your brain? (answer). [...]
Hi Predman and Alvaro-
Actually you shouldn’t be fooled by the simplistic diagrammatic appearance used to portray brain neurons. These images are often created by injecting cells with flourescent markers that allow us to see a single cell. What we don’t see are the countless divisions occurring as the dendrites spread out from the cell (like infinitely dividing branches on a tree) and other nerve dendrites attached at various points to that cell, like countless leaves from other trees intertwined with and attached at thousands of points to our ‘tree’. I think that wikepedia does a good job of describing neurologic synapses and clearly states the total number of synapses in our brains is between 100 and 500 trillion. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapse). This would translate to 1 to 5 thousand synapses per neuron and is more in keeping with the number of leaves on an Amazon tree.
Gil, thank you for the additional context.
Indeed, Marian Diamond did a great job when she titled her classic book Magic Trees of the Mind.