Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human’s will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique “neurotransmitter” messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.
But no. Look at neurons from the two species under a microscope and they look the same. They have the same electrical properties, many of the same neurotransmitters, the same protein channels that allow ions to flow in and out, as well as a remarkably high number of genes in common. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.
So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.
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Interesting on repeat TV last night – we use more than 15% of brain when innactive. But then when fully brain active is was just over 30%. So at any one time over 70% is not being used.
yes, it seems like i know many folks whose brains are indistinguishable from fruit flies’…
@David Morgan: The truth is actually that when we are just relaxing the activity is probably about 10-15% but when we are very active the percentage get’s higher. We obviously don’t need to use 100% of the brain at every moment of the day, but studies have shown that in a 24-hour period we normaly use 100% and we also use virtually all parts of the brain