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| Meet your
amazing brain |
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You're the owner of the
world's most powerful computer
It's not much bigger than a large
grapefruit.
It's much smaller than the heart of a lettuce. You
could hold it easily in one hand. It generally weighs under three pounds (1,500 grams).
Yet it's thousands of times more powerful than the world's most powerful computer. And
it's all yours: the brain that makes you and other humans so unique.
A fruit fly has 100,000 active brain cells. A mouse has
5 million. A monkey: 10 billion. You've had about 100 billion1
since birth.
And from the very earliest days of life those cells
form new learning connections, or synapses, at the incredible rate of 3 billion a second.2
Those connections are the key to brain power.
By comparison, in the first three days of the 1997
space journey over the surface of Mars, millions of users made 200 million Internet
"hits" to follow its progress. Yet your brain can make 15 times as many new
connections in a second as all the world's Internet users made in three days. No
one is using more than a fraction of that amazing ability. And every day scientists are
learning more about how to improve the process.
Ronald Kotulak, in Inside The Brain, summarizes
the incredible pace of brain research in the past decade by quoting Jeri Janowsky, a
neuro-psychologist: "Anything you learned two years ago is old information.
Neuroscience . . . is exploding."
Says psychologist and memory expert Tony Buzan:
"Your brain is made of a trillion brain cells. Each brain cell is like the most
phenomenally complex little octopus. It has a center, it has many branches, and each
branch has many connection points. Each one of those billions
Contents Page Preface
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