Brain Fact # 9
A Healthy Brain
Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School was asked – “Is there one main characteristic of a healthy brain?”
His answer – “There are 100 billion neurons in the brain. Each neuron has about 10,000 connections (synapses) to other cells. We have 1 quintillion (10 to the 18th) synapses and there are 1 quintillion transactions per second between neurons. A healthy brain is thus a very complex, dynamic and efficient system. One main characteristic of a healthy brain is the ability to being modified (being plastic).
The circumstances of our lives change very fast, too fast for genes to be able to modify our brain and make us able to cope with these changes. So nature invented plasticity, the capacity of the brain to be modified to cope with the changes. We have realized that a healthy brain is a brain that has the right amount of plasticity; not too much and not too little but optimal plasticity. Plasticity changes the nature of synapses and the number of synapses in the brain. These changes can occur following any type of activity of the brain”.
Guess what ? Reading this blog just changed the synapses in your brain!