The whole human race just got a little dumber: A new analysis of the number of neurons, those brain cells that transmit thoughts, in the human brain has come back with a staggeringly lower number than thought -- 14 billion brain cells fewer, about the size of the babboon brain.
The highly quoted number of human brian cells, 100 billion, doesn't stand up to actual experimental inquiry, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, an assistant professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, told the Nature neuroscience podcast NeuroPod.
The work was performed on four human brains, ages 50, 51, 54 and 71, from men who donated their brains to science. As The Guardian summarized:
The method involves dissolving the cell membranes of cells within the brain and creating a homogeneous mixture of the whole lot. You then take a sample of the soup, count the number of cell nuclei belonging to neurons (as opposed to other cells in the brain such as glia) and then scale up to get the overall number. The great advantage of this method is that unlike counting the number of neurons in one part of the brain and then extrapolating from that, it gets over the problem that different brain regions may have more or less densely packed neurons.The result, Herculano-Houzel told Neuropod, was that on average the human brain has 86 billion neurons, with none of the four brains examined holding 100 billion neurons. "Even though it may sound like a small difference the 14 billion neurons amount to pretty much the number of neurons that a baboon brain has or almost half the number of neurons in the gorilla brain. So that's a pretty large difference actually," he said.
Scientists debate how important this number is, though. Previous research on animal brains has indicated that bigger isn't necessarily better; the bulkier brains, holding lots of neurons, could just be what's needed to control larger bodies. Others contend that our big brains are necessary for our complex social lives, our extreme tool use or our ability to think about thinking, called metacognition.
Other researchers believe that our intelligence lies not in our brain size, but in the complexity of the brain's interactions. The brain is so complex and tangled in and around itself, in fact, that unraveling how it works has been a seemingly never-ending puzzle.
All in all, is a monkey's brain worth of neurons off the top really make all that big of a difference?
I just heard a mind-equals-brain boy being interviewed on NPR.
He's coined a word for the concept of how the pattern of connections in your brain determines your personality. It's the latest theory!
Sounds great! But, impossible.
What about experience prior to this lifetime? It is a KNOWN factor!
What about out of body experiences? They are REAL!
So: Don't fall for it. Someone is trying to feed us a line to convince us there is no way out of this little 3D box we call life in the physical universe. This is such a lie!
There are many ways out. The old standard, death, is somewhat workable by untidy, usually painful, and not really that effective.
But we have people today training students how to leave their bodies or how to help others leave their bodies. It is a modern fact, not just some obscure legend.
So, for those of us interested in moving forward in a more productive and potentially liberating line of development, this whole model needs to be re-worked. It is obvious that people don't "lose their minds" when they go exterior, so there must be a component of the mind that is made of very "fine" energy and that a being can take with him, or stay in communication with when exterior.
Those who have taken this approach have also discovered that this mind is usually not under very good control of the being, due to numerous mind control attempts down the track. So there is much the being can learn in the direction of handling the mind more skillfully.
It has also been discovered that the being has ways of perceiving and of acquiring knowledge that don't require the mind at all. The mind is nothing more than a local record of all experience. But anything requiring handling in present time can be handled in nothing BUT present time. No mental record is really needed.
Though these states, conditions, and abilities are largely theoretical on earth today, many people are getting closer and closer to being able to use and experience them. It just takes a commitment to the process and a lot of hard work.