One hundred billion

I never cease to be amazed when I study about how our bodies work. I recently read that our brains contain one hundred billion neurons. I had read this before, but what captured my imagination was the perspective the writer put on this. "Suppose each neuron was one dollar, and you stood on a street corner trying to give dollars away to people as they passed by, as fast as you could hand them out- let's say one dollar per second. If you did this twenty four hours a day, 365 days a year, without stopping, and if you had started on the day that Jesus was born, you would by the present day only have gone through about two thirds of your money."

When you consider that each of these neurons can then connect to other neurons in an extreme variety of ways, well that's an impressive amount of potential. What's even more amazing to me is that our children have a greater amount of connections that we do, because they are still gleaning so much new information. So don't miss out on those early opportunities to increase their cognitive skills by offering a broad variety of activities and stimuli.

Excerpt from This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin