Sort Your Brain Out

Your Amazing Brain

The word “amazing” seems to be used pretty loosely these days to describe a lot of things, many of which often turn out to be disappointingly mediocre; but in the case of your brain there is no other word that comes close to describing it.

This pink coloured, wrinkled lump of pulsating wetware, with a texture not dissimilar to blancmange, is composed of around 85% fat and weighs in at around 1.5 kg. It contains a densely woven meshwork of 86 billion brain wires along with a further 86 billion support cells, all neatly packed away between your ears. It is truly amazing.

As the ultimate supercomputer, your brain is currently light years ahead of anything that man has so far managed to create. It works relentlessly, non-stop around the clock, continuously reshaping to adapt our skills and behaviours to suit an almost infinite variety of different real and potential future circumstances. Receiving and delivering data, analyzing information, performing complex, multifunctional tasks in parallel and monitoring billions of functions; all at breathtaking speed. Its capabilities are quite staggering.

But when it comes to performance, what does your brain look like?

The map in the illustration above shows some of the main stops on the underground system that is your very own brain. There would be no benefit in overloading you with unnecessary information by talking about every area of your brain, but it would be useful to start by pointing out three key areas that are most relevant to what we'll be discussing in this book.

You may be wondering why there is a seahorse in the illustration. The Hippocampus includes the DG (Dentate Gyrus) and EC (Entorhinal Cortex) tube stops on the lower part of the Limbic Line, a particularly dense area of networked brain wires that is interconnected with virtually every other part of your brain.

This part of your brain plays three key roles:

1. It helps you keep track of where you are in space – a basic GPS system that gives you a sense of where you are and how to get where you're going.

2. It enables you to create and recall memories of events and pieces of information.

3. It’s even vital for the ability to imagine the future!

These two functions are closely related, as many of our memories of life events are closely intertwined with the places in which they were experienced. That way, when you return to that place, the relevant memories are triggered. Hence a visit to your old primary school can trigger a surge of long forgotten memories. In reality the Hippocampus cluster of tube stops in your brain is deep under the surface, at the core of your Temporal Lobe, which runs from behind your ear to behind your temples (hence the name).

Why a seahorse? If your brain's Hippocampus was surgically removed from the core of your Temporal Lobe, it would actually look very much like a seahorse; indeed Hippocampus actually means “horse” (hippo) – “sea monster” (campus) in ancient Greek.

Just to the right of the DG you'll find the Amygdala tube stop. This ever-alert brain area is responsible for, amongst other roles, generating various emotions, and constantly monitoring the sensory information spilling in from your surroundings for signs of potential danger. Like a military listening post for your brain, it is forever looking out for possible serious threats, always primed and ready to push the “fear response button” the split second one is detected. This is the part of your brain that, within less than a crotchet of time, having heard a loud bang or having spotted a rapidly approaching, incoming object causes you to freeze in your tracks or duck out of the way – before you are even fully aware of it. With your heart now pounding and your muscles flooded with blood, you're all set and ready for a confrontation or a hasty exit.

Just above the Amygdala tube stop is the Reward Line that passes deep through the very centre of your brain. It evolved to produce pleasure whenever you engage in behaviours that promote the survival of our species i.e. eating, drinking and having sex. Known collectively as the reward pathways – the VTA (or Ventral Tegmental Area), NA (Nucleus Accumbens) and OFC (Orbitofrontal Cortex) stops are also critical to decision making. As well as enabling us to feel pleasure in any given moment, the NA stop provides a reward-based prediction built around how much pleasure or benefit is likely to be derived from choosing one particular option over another. This means that not only are they instrumental in directing every single decision we ever make, they are also fundamental to the learning process. Without the reward system we would never learn from any of our mistakes.

To help give you a clearer perspective of what we're looking at here, the London Underground can, at this moment in time, proudly boast a combined track length of 250 miles, with tube trains travelling around between 270 stations at a top speed of up to 70 mph.

There are more connections between brain wires in your head than there are stars in our Galaxy – 0.15 quadrillion.

If all your brain wires were laid out end to end, they would be approximately 100,000 miles in length with hundreds of thousands of trillions of trains all travelling up and down, bang on time, at up to 250 miles per hour between 1,000 trillion connections; or synapses as they are known to science. And, if all these wires – the white matter of your brain – were laid out as an underground train network it would cover an area of 561,476 square miles, a surface area greater than that of South Africa, all tucked into a space smaller than your average pumpkin.

But what really makes the human brain so very special is NEUROPLASTICITY. Its ability to continuously change, learn and, perhaps even more importantly, its ability to adapt to unexpected and widely varying circumstances in new and creative ways.

Your brain can send up to one hundred, thousand, trillion messages per second using only the same amount of power as your average fridge light bulb. For a man-made supercomputer to send and receive that many messages per second it would require its own small hydroelectric power plant to provide the 10,000,000 watts needed to power it. Less than a litre of blood passing every minute through the brain of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was sufficient to keep his forehead cool to the touch, whilst his opponent – the IBM super computer Deep Blue – needed a fan-driven cooling system to prevent it from blowing up.

Taxi! Fresh challenges bring about physical changes to your brain. The drivers of London's famous black cabs spend years learning “The Knowledge,” a seemingly indigestible mountain of information to commit to memory by anyone's standards. Included in it are the whereabouts of 25,000 streets along with 20,000 places of interest that at any time a fare-paying passenger, having hopped into the back of their cab, may ask to go to. During this period of exhaustive information ingestion, the Hippocampi of these determined wannabe cabbies physically grow larger due to all of the extra connections required to retain all that information – only to return to their normal size after retirement. It really is a case of use it or lose it!

What this shows is that your brain not only adapts to take on new challenges, it physically restructures itself to meet them. As yet, there is no computer capable of reconfiguring in this way to cope with new demands asked of it. Not bad for a design that first appeared on the scene back in the Stone Age, and which still out-competes the most complex systems of the modern age – well, for the moment anyway! When we sleep our brain cells shrink to allow cerebrospinal fluid to seep into the gaps to wash away the metabolic waste that accumulates each and every day.

It doesn't come with a guarantee or any warranties, but if you look after your brain, it should remain fully functional and in good working order throughout your entire lifetime. And, if you're ever worried about running out of memory space, please don't! You'll be relieved to hear that it comes with the equivalent memory space of a one million gigabyte chip. That's enough memory to record over three million hours' worth of your favourite TV programmes.

Your brain is a phenomenal, unimaginably brilliant piece of kit and, please note, the emphasis on your brain – we all have the same make and model. Provided you are of this planet, that you are a human being, and your name isn't Albert Einstein, there would have been very little difference between the brain that you had and the brain the person sat next to you had when you both started out in life.

During early pregnancy 250,000 new neurons are born in the fetal brain every minute.

Yours may be the same make and model but when it comes to shaping your brain and differentiating it’s individual performance from that of others, there are three very big influencing factors:

1. The environments that you spend most of your time interacting with

2. What you are exposed to in those...