âWe are the laggard partner in this co-evolution.â âShe said that Newry's success is not through external help but through the energy of the people that âcaptured the imagination of the whole of Ireland and even cajoled the laggard politicians.ââ
One type of neuron called the Purkinje cell, found in the cerebellum, may have as many as one hundred thousand synapses.How big is a synapse? [ii]Synapses are very small. This narrow gap of extracellular space is approximately 20-40 nanometers (nm) wide. For an idea of scale, one inch is about 25.4 million nm long. The thickness of a single sheet of paper is about 100,000 nm.[iii]How many synapses are in the human brain?[iv][v]Current studies estimate that the average adult male human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons.
The basic functional unit of the brain is the neuron, a special cell that sends electrochemical signals to other neurons (across a synaptic gap) and thereby creates those patterns that make up what we think of as the mind. The complexity of the task requires a fairly inconceivable 100 billion neurons, interconnected via trillions of synapses. A single firing neuron might communicate to thousands of others in a single moment. No computer comes close to the complexity of these communicating bits of organic matter. What's more, for each neuron there are some 10 to 50 glial cells providing structural support, protection, resources and more.