THE NUMBER OF YOUR BRAIN CELLS
The next stage in this Star Trek-like exploration of the microscopic universe was truly mind-boggling. In the last half of the 20th century, it was discovered that the number of brain cells was not just a few million – it was a million million! 167 times the number of people on the planet!
The significance of this number would be immense, even if each brain cell could perform only very basic operations. If each brain cell were, however, immensely powerful, the significance of their number would take scientists into realms that are almost supernatural.
How powerful are these brain cells? Well, read on …
Brain Cell Power!
Before we consider the power of the human brain cell, let’s first analyse the brain capacity of an insect such as a bee. Why? Because, surprisingly, the bee (and every other living animal) has the same super-bio-computer chip as a human. What a bee can do with only a few brain cells puts into sharp relief your potential using millions of millions of the same brain cells.
Mind Map exercise: what can a bee do?
Take a large piece of paper and quickly Mind Map all the things you think a bee can do. You could start by drawing a bee as your central image and then add main branches with ideas of the major things you think of, such as ‘FLY.’ Add sub-branches to these main branches to fully explore each of the main ideas you have.
When you start thinking about it, bees can do the most amazing things with their brains. They can:
1 Build. Bees are among the master architects of the insect world, constructing intricate and complex ‘high-rises’ that can house entire communities.
2 Care for their young.
3 Collect pollen and information.
4 Communicate. By movement, sound, and gesture, bees can communicate to others intricate information concerning plant locations and types of blossom.
5 Count. Bees can locate chosen objects again by remembering the number of significant items on the way to the desired goal.
6 Dance. When bees return to the hive they perform a complex dance that conveys to their companions the location and navigational information about a new find.
7 Distinguish other bees.
8 Eat.
9 Fight. Not only fight, but fight with such ferocity, focus, speed, and coordination of their multiple fighting appendages, that they make even speeded-up karate films look slow and pathetic by comparison.
10 Fly.
11 Hear. Just like us.
12 Learn. See points 4 and 5 above.
13 Live in an organized community and function appropriately (compare with our own behavior!).
14 Make decisions. Bees can decide to change the temperature of their hive, to convey or not convey information, to fight and to migrate.
15 Navigate. On a miniature scale, the bee is the equivalent of any of our most sophisticated aircraft. Imagine trying to land (which a bee can) on a waving leaf in a strong and gusting wind.
16 Produce honey.
17 Regulate temperature. When the hive becomes too hot, a group of bees will work in harmony to ‘reset’ the temperature of the hive to within one-tenth of a degree centigrade, using their wings as a giant communal fan, and beating cool air through the hive until the desired temperature is reached.
18 Remember. They could not count, communicate or survive if they didn’t!
19 Reproduce.
20 See, including ultraviolet light.
21 Smell.
22 Swarm in more intricate formation than jet fighter squadrons.
23 Taste.
24 Think.
25 Touch.
The Mind Map opposite sums up all the things a bee can do.
How many brain cells does the bee have in order to do all these things? Millions? No. Fewer than a million. A bee has approximately 960,000 brain cells.
If a bee can do all this with its relatively few thousand brain cells, are we making the most of our million, million cells? Probably not!
The Intricate Structure of Brain Cells
As microscopes became more sophisticated, scientists discovered more and more about our brains. They saw that each cell had its own centre, a nucleus, and that this nucleus was much more than simply ‘the centre of the brain cell’. It was, rather, the brain cell’s own ‘brain’ and, based on what we know about the bee, a tiny brain of magnificent power. Literally, a brain within a brain, within your brain!
Then, at the end of the 20th century, another miraculous discovery was made. The Max Planck Laboratory filmed, for the first time in human history, a living brain cell. It had been taken from a living brain and was contained in a deep rectangular channel of brain fluid in a petri dish under the electron-microscope. The film, which has changed the lives of all those who have seen it, showed this amazing little being to have a completely independent intelligence. With its hundreds of baby-like hands, like an amoeba, it extended and retracted, sensitively and focusedly reaching out to every atom of the space in its newly confined universe – looking for connection – a moving Mind Map. It was like seeing the most impossibly delicate, sensitive, and intelligent being from outer space. How, then, does each one of these amazing brain-cell creatures relate to others?
THE BRAIN CELL AND ITS FRIENDS
Your brain cell operates by forming fantastically complex links with tens of thousands of its neighbours and companions. These links are made primarily when its main and biggest branch (the axon) makes multiple thousands of connections with the little buttons on many thousands of many branches of many thousand other brain cells.
Each contact point is known as a synapse. When an electromagnetic bio-chemical message (the nerve impulse) surges down the axon, it is released through the synaptic button, which is connected to the dendritic spine. Between the two there is a tiny space.
The nerve impulse fires hundreds of thousands of the spheres called vesicles across the synaptic gap in what, in the microcosmic world, must look like a mega Niagara Falls. These vesicles journey at lightning speed across the synaptic gap and attach, like millions of messenger pigeons, to the surface of the dendritic spine. The messages are then transmitted along the branches of the receiving brain cell to its own axon, which then transmits the message through its branches to other brain cells, and so on and on and on, creating the intricate pathway of a thought. These pathways are maps, the internal, physical Mind Maps of your thought. The Mind Maps you make on paper reflect these Mind Maps in your head.
A brain cell and its connections