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brain facts are somewhat outdated--Sagan died in 1996--but no one gives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--with the
current stimulus package--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 at 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.) Imagine three
pounds of brain tissue with more than 100 billion nerve cells (neurons),
with the neurons making 100 to 1000 to even 5000 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.
