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.
Heredity (nature) determines the basic number of âneuronsâ (brain nerve cells) children are born with, and their initial arrangement. At birth, a babyâs brain contains 100 billion neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way, and almost all the neurons the brain will ever have. The brain starts forming prenatally, about three weeks after conception. Before birth, the brain produces trillions more neurons and âsynapsesâ (connections between the brain cells) than it needs. During the first years of life, the brain undergoes a series of extraordinary changes.