Times Article

OKAY, this article was awesome, the analogies really put aspects of the brain to life for me. This was very helpful to me and interesting is an understatement. A reference I liked was the comparison between the 100 billion neurons at birth to the stars of the milky way. You can sort of imagine how many stars are in the milky way, I mean, it is something that we can sort of see in the sky. As we learn of the milky way, to us we only see what is visible. I think this is a very comparable thing to our own brain and the billions of neurons we don't use/see. Something else I thought was interesting is the statistic that the brain of a neglected person is 20%-30% smaller than a child who is nurtured. How does this statistic stand with "nature" theorists I wonder? It seems like a pretty blunt statistic to not believe that nature has something to do with our development. Something that I thought was probably one of the best analogies for me was the brain is like a tadpole, as the tadpole develops into a frog, it looses its tail. Just as we are have temporary structures in our brain to help lay down connection like the neural tube, it falls off like a tail. The thing that is amazing to me is that we have more connections when we are two years old then when we are adults. That is sort of something that is harder to understand because when we are adults, we have more stimulation, more experiences, more knowledge... how come we don't have more connections? I understand the pruning, and the riding of all the excess, it is just hard to accept. Some day I want to be an adult bird that feeds my hatch lings with morsels of richness towards verbalizing words. It is interesting to me that just my talking to a child there connectivity are enhanced and even their heart beat raises. I agree with what they said about language, I wish I had some type of immersion class where we had a foreign language in my elementary because it was even hard for me to learn simple hello and goodbye in high school. Also, I think that having a second language is a big advantage in the world, there are so many opportunities for better jobs and of course more connections in the brain! So the main thing that I wonder about my own brain after reading this article is, how did my brain make it? It seems there are so many thing that can go wrong. It is just a miracle, but still even though people are just the same as I, it is still amazing that our brains are so intricate. Our brains really set us apart from any other mammal and that is pretty cool. Except the only draw back is, for instance when a tiger kills its prey, it doesn't think back after it is chomping on the meat, how could I have done that better? Did I look okay? ... it's just our way of life, but I think it is great!