26 APR 2012 by ideonexus

 Number of Neuron Connection in the Brain

Each nerve cell receives connections from other nerve cells at six sites called synapses. But here is an astonishing fact—there are about one million billion connections in the cortical sheet. If you were to count them, one connection (or synapse) per second, you would finish counting some thirty-two million years after you began. Another way of getting a feeling for the numbers of connections in this extraordinary structure is to consider that a large match-head's worth of your brain conta...
Folksonomies: biology brain numbers
Folksonomies: biology brain numbers
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The different possible number of connections outnumbers the particles in the Universe (this is questionable).

08 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 The Human Propensity for Dichotomy

The zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as a perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off, right and left, light and dark, form and matter, mind and body, white and black, good and evil, right and wrong, life and death, something and nothing, this and that, here and there, inside and out, active and passive, true and false, yes and no, sanity and madness, health and sickness, up and down, sense and...
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We have an ingrained tendency to see everything in the world in terms of opposites.