How much of our brains do we use? One hundred per cent. Or 3 per cent. It’s commonly said we only use 10 per cent of our brain. This usually leads to discussions of what we might do if only we could harness the other 90 per cent. In fact, all of the human brain is used at one time or another. On the other hand, a recent paper by Peter Lennie of the New York University Center for Neural Science indicates that the brain should ideally have no more than 3 per cent of neurons firing at any one time, otherwise the energy needed to ‘reset’ each neuron after it fires becomes too much for the brain to handle. The central nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord and is made of two kinds of cells: neurons and glia. Neurons are the basic information processors, receiving input and sending output between each other. Input arrives through the neuron’s branch-like dendrites; output leaves through the cable-like axons. Each neuron may have as many as 10,000 dendrites but only has one axon. The axon may be thousands of times longer than the tiny cell body of the neuron itself. The largest axon in a giraffe is 4.5 metres (15 feet) long.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:08:05 +0000
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