Article By Ben Brumfield
“The human brain is believed to have more than 160 billion cells; more than half of them are neurons. And they often share thousands of connections with neighboring neurons to form somewhere between 100 trillion and a quadrillion circuits flashing day and night. That’s many hundreds of times more circuits than there are twinkling stars in the Milky Way. No room-filling supercomputer consuming millions of watts of power has come close to the composite abilities of our two heaping handfuls of gray and white matter. And our brain needs only 20 watts to operate, less than many lightbulbs.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, a rare synergy of engineers and scientists, in cooperation with Emory University School of Medicine and other collaborators, is expanding data collection and analysis on the brain.” Read more here
“The hippocampus is aptly named. “Hippo” is ancient Greek for “horse,” “kampos” for “sea monster.” The deep brain region is curve-shaped like a sea horse, and it helps you get around from place to place by facilitating orientation.
Work on its encoding of location garnered scientists a Nobel Prize in 2014 for describing the brain’s GPS. They also found that the hippocampus, which is important for memory as well, lays down some consistent neural code, contrasting with neural networks’ often fluxing firing patterns…” Read more here