Believe it or not SPACE is not the FINAL Frontier

Believe it or not SPACE is not the FINAL Frontier.
The human brain is the most complex thing known to man.

Consider these facts:

After a few minutes of exercise, your heart is pumping, you breathe faster and start to sweat. Why?

Your brain is constantly monitoring and fine tuning what is going on in your body - 24 hours a day, year after year - without you even being aware of it.

Super Senses!

Our sense organs link us with the outside world.
They take in information and send it to the brain. Here it's deciphered and turned into something meaningful.

We communicate through our sense organs - touching, seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling.

Jeremy Henley, Professor of Molecular
Neuroscience in the Department of Anatomy, nconsiders that the last great frontier of science is nwhether the brain can understand itself. Here he ngives us an insight into just how difficult that might be.

THE FINAL FRONTIER n nnhuman brain has about 100 billion neurons nnabout a tenth of the total number of cells in the brain

If you take a Cray Computer (one of the largest computers in the world) and measure its wiring, it has about 60,000 miles in total. If you take the brain and look at it in those terms, it has been estimated that it has over 200,000 miles of wiring!

The Brain is often compared with objects and performance figures in the real world to give us an idea of the complexity and power it has. One example is that if you compared all of the world's telephone systems with the brain, by comparison they would only occupy space that was the size of a small pea! Another comparison is that the Cray Computer, one of the largest computers in the world can make 400 million calculations a second. If it did that for one hundred years it would equal what the brain can do in a minute!

The Brain is about the size of two clenched fists and weighs about 3 pounds (1.4 kilogrammes) and contains 1000 trillion trillion (that is a very big number!) Protein molecules.

In the brain there are 1,000,000,000,000 (a million million) individual neurons or nerve cells.

If each neuron can interact with anywhere between 1 and 100,000 other neurons then the brain's potential for pattern forming (the number of possible permutations) is a massive number that even in normal text would require 10.5 million kilometres of space to write one after the other!

That means that your brain has an almost infinite capacity for storing information.

OXYGEN AND THE BRAIN n

Last month, I told you that one of the essential brain foods was oxygen. How important is it to get oxygen to the brain? Well although the brain amounts to only about 2% of the body's weight, it consumes 25% of the body's oxygen intake! nn nn

BRAIN FOODS n

Your brain needs four basic foods to survive:

1. Oxygen (aerobic exercise is good for you).

2. A balanced and nutritious diet (eat your greens).

3. New and varied knowledge and information (keep on learning).

4. Affection and love.

If you saw the ezine letter NUTRITION AND THE BRAIN , then nnyou realize that the chemical reactions that goes on in the brain are

Astronomically large.

As of the 1990s it was estimated that we use less than 1% of our

Brain. Truth be told we still know little about our BRAIN. n