The Human Brain

Your brain makes up two per cent of your body, but twenty per cent of the blood that comes from your heart flows to your brain. Your brain is the most protected organ in your body. The 100- 200 billion cells that make up your brain are guarded by three different layersÄthe scalp, the skull, and a set of membranes that envelope the brain and spinal cord called meninges.

The brain has two types of cellsÄneurons and neuroglia. The neurons transmit information throughout the brain. The neuroglia protect the neurons. You are born with a fixed number of brain cells which you gradually lose. By the age of three, a human has lost half of the brain cells you had at birth, and while that loss rate decreases, the losses occur none-the-less. The brain compensates for these losses by changing its structureÄconnections between neurons change and become more complex. Different parts of the brain control different functions for us sight, hearing, etc., and even memory occurs in its own section of the brain.

We marvel at computers and the people who build them and program them. The human brain is so enormously more complex than any system man has designed. To suggest that this device which builds computers, creates art and music, and expresses the beauty of literature and mathematics could arise by chance defies any logical viewpoint of what we are. The Psalmist said it best when he said "I will praise thee Lord, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made and that my soul knoweth right well" (Psalm 139:14)


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