UNDERSTANDING HOW THE BRAIN WORKS
The human brain weighs only three pounds and is estimated to have more or less 100 billion cells. It is hard to get a handle on a number that large (or connections that small). Let's try to get an understanding of this complexity by comparing it with something humans have created--the entire phone system for the planet earth .
If we took all the phones in the world and all the wires (there are over four billion people on the planet), the number of connections and the trillions of messages per day would NOT equal the complexity or activity of a single human brain.
Now let's take a "small problem"--break every phone in Los Angeles and cut every wire in the state. How long would it take for the entire state (about 16 million people) to get phone service back? A week, a month, or several years? If you guessed several years, you are now beginning to see the complexity of recovering from a head injury. In the example LA residents would be without phone service while the rest of the world had phone service that worked fine. This is also true with people who have a head injury. Some parts of the brain will work fine while others are in need of repair or are slowly being reconnected.
No comments:
Post a Comment