Please click on the picture for an excellent brain tutorial. A more advanced website--intended for first year medical students--detailing central nervous system anatomy, can be found at: Washington University School of Medicine. 

Here's a great talk about the brain by the wondrous Carl Sagan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SHc67Hep48&NR=1&feature=fvwp

(some of the brain facts are somewhat outdated--Sagan died in 1996--but no one gives a more elegant picture of the brain)

You are your brain. This simple fact is at the heart of any lawsuit involving brain injuries. All of your physical, emotional and cognitive life arises in your brain and is expressed by your brain. Everything you feel, see, hear, say, think, remember or do is the result of your brain. Understanding the complexity of the brain is therefore of great interest and importance in a legal case involving injuries to your brain. See my article, How Trauma Affects the Brain. Here are two animations from YouTube linked in that article illustrating trauma to the brain: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gCMS8aOmK1M; http://youtube.com/watch?v=AmAML1-F2LE. 

The media also is finally paying attention.  In 2007, Time Magazine and National Geographic both ran cover stories on the brain. 

Here's the National Geographic cover story in the November, 2007, issue. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-11/memory/foer-text.html.  An interactive site showing the functions of the brain is provided by National Geographic at this link. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-11/memory/brain-interactive.html. 

Here's how Time describes the brain, consciousness, and the formation of memories in its January 29, 2007, cover story.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html. 

Late in his career, Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate who was one of the co-discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA, announced what he called his "astonishing hypothesis" of the brain and mind: "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." 

Others have since commented on Dr. Crick's hypothesis, some of whom, such as the evolutionary biologist Edwin O. Wilson, describe a genetic basis for a predisposition to religious belief.  But there need be no conflict between the religious and secular positions.  Simply stated, whether the gift of a brain comes from God or nature, there can be no doubt it is the brain which processes all of the input and output making us who we are.

You Are Your Brain

Like our star--the Sun--a healthy brain is central to your life on Earth. Your brain is a galaxy of nerve cells and their connections that constitutes your entire world. 

Weighing about three pounds but requiring at least 20% of the oxygen of your body, your brain is estimated to have 100 billion nerve cells (neurons). Neurons are the longest living cells in the body, sometimes surviving for a person's lifetime. Each neuron is estimated to have between 100 and 10,000 connections (synapses). Assuming an average of 1000 synapses for each neuron, a conservative estimate (see discussion, below), there are at least 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) connections or synapses between the nerve cells in your brain. 

These synaptic connections are how your brain processes all of your senses, thoughts and memories. All of the information coming into and leaving your brain does so as patterns of electrochemical activity. Your brain is a black box, there is no light, sound or even feeling, such as pain, in brain tissue itself. What you see, hear, think and feel is caused by these electrical signals passing along fibers, called axons, extending from the nerve cells. These electrical messages are carried across microscopic synapses, tiny open spaces, by chemicals known as neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, to neighboring cells. 

How you perceive and act in the world, as well as how you form thoughts and memories, is determined by the sequences of patterns of this electrochemical activity in your brain. Patterns are strengthened or weakened based on your life experiences and are more readily recognized in your brain as they become more familiar. From conception throughout life, cells that fire together, wire together. It is your individual wiring pattern that makes you who you are. Because there are an astronomical number of possible combinations and connections of neurons, no two persons are the same--not even identical twins. You, and any brain injury you may suffer, are unique.

Memory is described in the National Geographic cover story in the November, 2007, issue: 

"What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists can do for the moment is this: A memory is a stored pattern of connections between neurons in the brain. There are about a hundred billion of those neurons, each of which can make perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons, which makes a total of about five hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses in the average adult brain. By comparison there are only about 32 trillion bytes of information in the entire Library of Congress's print collection. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alters the connections within that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep."

Using the National Geographic estimate of 500 trillion (500,000,000,000,000) to 1000 trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000 or one million billion or one quadrillion), connections in the brain, or the more conservative estimate of "only" 100 trillion connections, quantifies the magnitude of the complexity. This number defies any real comprehension. If you were to count one connection each second around the clock, it would take you more than three million years, based on the "low" estimate of 100 trillion connections, to 32 million years, based on the higher estimate of 1000 trillion connections, to just count the number of connections in a single human brain. (For those who like math: 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days = 31,536,000 seconds per year; 1000 trillion/31,536,000 = 31,709,792 years.) This number even makes the national budget deficit seem puny. 

Gerald Edelman, winner of a Nobel prize for his work on the immune system, is the founder and director of The Neurosciences Institute, a nonprofit research center in San Diego devoted to the study of the biological basis of higher brain function in humans.  Dr. Edelman describes the "awe-inspiring" complexity of the brain. As he states in his book, Second Nature, "the number (one million billion) of possible active pathways of such a structure (a human brain) far exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe."

This is an MRI study of the brain.

No wonder, as described in several of my articles on the website, brain injuries often involve microscopic damage that cannot be seen on standard structural neuroimaging studies such as CT and MRI scans.  In many instances, especially in "mild" traumatic brain injury, these scans simply do not have the resolution necessary to show damage to large numbers of infinitesimally tiny neurons and their connections. This limitation of current neuroimaging studies, however, does not make the damage or its effect on the brain injury survivor any less real.

[Of course, sometimes these neuroimaging scans are critically important because they pick up larger scale damage to the brain (damage that is not microscopic). The standard of care for anyone treated in a hospital with any type of head injury is to get a CT scan on an emergency basis.  For example, the tragic death of Natasha Richardson in 2008 would almost certainly have been avoided if she had been taken to a hospital shortly after her injury.  The bleeding within her brain would have shown on a CT scan and could have been removed before the pooling blood crushed her brain tissue within the confines of her hard skull.] 

Before concluding the website let me give you an analogy between your brain and the universe. This is not meant to suggest that one explains or even relates to the other in any scientific way, only to illustrate the magnificence and complexity of both and to show how remarkable your brain is.

Here's a picture of a slice of the heavens above.

[The Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.]

[This is the Milky Way galaxy, the one in which we find ourselves. It is actually a giant, as its mass is probably between 750 billion and one trillion solar masses, and its diameter is about 100,000 light years.]

Imagine 50,000 to 100,000 light years of space (and don't forget, light travels 186,000 miles or 300,000 kilometers per second) with 750, 800 billion or even a trillion stars, within just one galaxy among an estimated total of 125 billion galaxies in the universe. (Apparently there are "only" an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy when all of the billions of galaxies are considered together. 125 billion galaxies multiplied by 100 billion stars per galaxy equals 125 followed by 18 zeroes.)  Imagine three pounds of brain tissue with more than 100 billion nerve cells (neurons), with the neurons making 100 to 500 to even 1000 trillion or more connections, in each brain of every human being on a planet with 6.6 billion people. Both are true estimates of the enormous complexity within each of us and surrounding all of us that we take for granted in our daily lives.

Perhaps the best ending for my website is a wonderful poem about the brain:

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--
For--put them side by side--
The one the other will contain
With ease--and You--beside--

The Brain is deeper than the sea--
For--hold them--Blue to Blue--
The one the other will absorb--
As Sponges--Buckets--do--

The Brain is just the weight of God--
For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--
And they will differ--if they do--
As Syllable from Sound--

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862

Judges and juries want to learn about the brain. They want to know why and how a brain is injured and how and why that affects you, the brain injury survivor. Your job is to be honest and truthful; your credibility is the foundation of your case. It is your lawyer's job to teach those who will decide your case about the brain and to help them understand and appreciate the reality and severity of your brain injury. Once the jurors learn about the brain and appreciate your credibility, they can empathize with you; they will truly know what it feels like to be in your shoes. 

It is up to your lawyer to inspire the jury to do justice. In our democratic society, justice for those injured by the fault of another means fair monetary compensation. That is the law. Those who are responsible for deciding your legal case can be trusted to do so fairly when they are educated about the brain and understand and believe the great loss each of us would suffer if we had your injury.

I hope my website helps you if you or your loved one 

 face these life-challenging injuries.

Thanks for looking.