Brain Week: How Your Mind Works

Today’s “Brain Week” feature is from the New York Review of Books. The June 26, 2008 issue featured a review of seven current works on the brain. Click on the link to see the reviews by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff, “How the Mind Works: Revelations.” Here is an excerpt:

The brain is of course tremendously complex: a bundle of some hundred billion neurons, or nerve cells, each sharing as many as ten thousand connections with other neurons. But at its most fundamental level, the neuron, the brain’s structure is not difficult to grasp. A large crown of little branches, known as “dendrites,” extends above the body of the cell and receives signals from other neurons, while a long trunk or “axon,” which conducts neural messages, projects below, occasionally shooting off to connect with other neurons. The structure of the neuron naturally lends itself to comparison with the branches, trunk, and roots of a tree, and indeed the technical term for the growth of dendrites is “arborization.”

You can read the entire article here.