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Brain exercise: more brain connections or leaves in the Amazon?

braintop 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)

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Categories: Brain Teasers, Cognitive Neuroscience, Uncategorized

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8 Responses

  1. Predman says:

    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.

  2. Alvaro says:

    Hello Pred­man, very good point. Yes, it depends on the def­i­n­i­tion of “connections”

  3. […] “Guessti­mate”. Are there more leaves in the Ama­zon rain­for­est or neu­ron con­nec­tions in your brain? (answer). […]

  4. […] “Guessti­mate”. Are there more leaves in the Ama­zon rain­for­est or neu­ron con­nec­tions in your brain? (answer). […]

  5. gil says:

    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.

  6. 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.

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