The fascinating brain

On the 18th of April 1955, something astounding happened in the world history not known to many. A medical doctor, Thomas Harvey, stole the famous scientist Albert Einstein’s brain after conducting a post-mortem on him at Princeton Hospital. Why did Dr. Harvey do that? He wanted to understand the reason behind Einstein’s genius by studying his brain. It is not surprising that the complex brain intrigues each one of us. It is now widely believed that we are nothing but our brains. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to study the human brain due to the fact that this tiny lump of one and a half kg mass has around 100 billion nerve cells roughly making 10,000 connections each. There exists a humongous jungle of nerve cells underneath our skull. Such is the level of complexity that if you start counting one cell per second, it will take you about 3,171 years just to count 100 billion nerve cells leave alone the connections. If you happen to align these nerve cells end to end then it will stretch up to New Delhi starting from Mumbai.

What do we know about the inner workings of the human brain? One nerve cell is connected to thousands of other nerve cells in a manner that information flows from one cell to another. There are chemicals involved which help in the transfer of this information. In brief, nerve cells communicate with each other and this is how our brain functions. Any phenomenon which can potentially disrupt this communication will cause malady of the brain such as depression, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease etc.