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Home › Articles › Behavior › Baby's Brain

Baby's Brain

The Secret Life of the Brain

By Richard Restak, M.D.

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on itself and undergo such a dramatic change in appearance? Think of the last time you packed a suitcase. Folding your clothes allowed you to enclose a comparatively large surface of your wardrobe within the fixed confines of the suitcase. A similar situation exists in the brain: A large surface area can be crammed into the fixed volume of the human skull only by wrinkling and enfolding. "The surface of the brain folds in on itself as a way of accommodating an increasing surface area without changing the intracranial volume into which it has to fit," says Rivkin.

A large surface area is important because it increases the number of neurons (brain cells) that can be accommodated within the cerebral cortex, the outer 2 millimeters of the hemispheres. This thin rind (cortex means "rind" in Latin) that is less than the thickness of an orange peel and has the consistency of tapioca pudding contains two-thirds of all the 100 billion neurons in the human brain and almost three-quarters of the 100 trillion interneuronal connections.

These neurons have formed more connections than there are stars in the universe. For example, by three weeks of development (when the developing embryo is about the size of a grain of rice), neurons are forming at a rate of more than 250,000 per minute. The final number of neurons at birth will surpass one hundred billion.

As development progresses, each neuron will make as many as 10,000 connections to other nerve cells in the brain. Amazingly, unlike other cells in the body that regularly die and are replaced, the neurons your baby will have in old age are the same neurons that formed during development in the womb.

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