Brain in sentence

4290 examples of Brain in a sentence

Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities.

If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be.

So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able.

And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around.

Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities.

That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body.

So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes.

Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain.

The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses.

That's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working.

So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special.

Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain.

Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex.

So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals?

It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter.

So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup.

It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup.

This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain.

Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had.

Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons.

But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain.

The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be.

Well, what about our brain then?

Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain.

So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos.

A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons.

The human brain is not a large rat brain.

And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate.

His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains.

So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons.

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