The Brain - A marvel! For all its mysterious po
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Posted On: 06/06/2024 8:44:46 PM
The Brain - A marvel!
For all its mysterious powers, the brain boggles at the miracle of itself. Weighing about three pounds in most adults, t he organ is primarily made of fat mixed with lesser amounts of water, salts, protein and carbohydrates. Powered by blood and a little electricity, this concoction conceived the plays of Shakespeare, composed the symphonies of Beethoven and placed a telescope a million miles into space to see almost to the dawn of time.
How does it do that? Researchers at Harvard and Google used their brains — boosted by AI — to make a little progress toward understanding. Using a tiny sample of living brain tissue (the byproduct of a surgical intervention to treat epilepsy in a 45-year-old woman), they painstakingly scanned the sample with an electron microscope to reveal the wiring diagram at the cellular level.
The map they discovered is staggering in its complexity. In one cubic millimeter of tissue — roughly the size of a sharpened pencil point — the scientists mapped roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, which are the links that carry current between neurons. An entire adult brain is approximately 1 million times larger in volume than the mapped specimen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/...discovery/
For all its mysterious powers, the brain boggles at the miracle of itself. Weighing about three pounds in most adults, t he organ is primarily made of fat mixed with lesser amounts of water, salts, protein and carbohydrates. Powered by blood and a little electricity, this concoction conceived the plays of Shakespeare, composed the symphonies of Beethoven and placed a telescope a million miles into space to see almost to the dawn of time.
How does it do that? Researchers at Harvard and Google used their brains — boosted by AI — to make a little progress toward understanding. Using a tiny sample of living brain tissue (the byproduct of a surgical intervention to treat epilepsy in a 45-year-old woman), they painstakingly scanned the sample with an electron microscope to reveal the wiring diagram at the cellular level.
The map they discovered is staggering in its complexity. In one cubic millimeter of tissue — roughly the size of a sharpened pencil point — the scientists mapped roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, which are the links that carry current between neurons. An entire adult brain is approximately 1 million times larger in volume than the mapped specimen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/...discovery/
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