What part of your body sends messages at 240 mph?
What part of your body generates more electrical impulses in a single day than all the world’s telephones put together?
Which part of your body has over 1,000,000,000,000,000 connections – more than the number of stars in the universe?
Which part of your body is made up of 15 billion cells?
The answer to all of these questions is your brain.
Your brain is your body’s power tool.
Many people believe in the power of computers but the brain is more complicated than any computer we can imagine:
The world’s most sophisticated computer is currently only as complicated as a rat’s brain.
The brain controls everything in the body: it processes a vast quantity of information about what is happening around us and inside us.
It’s the decision-maker that issues instructions to the rest of the body.
Crucial messages pass in and out of the brain through a network of millions of nerve cells that pass on information to other nerve cells, rather like a very complex electrical circuit.
The brain is responsible for regulating our emotions and our bodily sensations such as pain, thirst and hunger. And as if it didn’t have enough to do, it also takes care of memory and learning.
Scientists believed until recently that, unlike the other organs in the body, the brain was not capable of renewal or growth once we had attained adulthood. Evidence to suggest that new brain cells can be produced throughout the whole of our lives.
In 1998, researchers working under the direction of Professor Fred H. Gage at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in California and at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Göteborg, Sweden, discovered that large numbers of new brain cells develop in an area of the brain involved with leaning and memory.
This reinforces the ‘use it or lose it’ theory of brain ageing.
It suggests that we do not have to remain victims of the way we are made and we can develop new positive ways of thinking and acting.
 
What do you think? Can you teach an old dog new tricks?
