19th August 2010
Ignited Child!
It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein
I mentioned to you about neurons and I said that the various information that we gather are stored in the brain. I also said that we are born with 100 billion neurons. Once we are born, no more neurons are added to our brain. We only lose neurons every day through attrition, decay and disuse. Per day we lose anywhere from 10,000 to 35,000 neurons per day. Since we are born with 100 billion neurons, we don't notice the death of this much of neurons per day.
Human brain also contains another type of cells called glial. These glial cells connect the neurons with each other. Brain scientists say that the true measure of intelligence is not decided by the mere number of neurons, but by the density of neurons and how the neurons are connected with each other. Glial cells act as the bonding material to connect neurons. Marian Diamond found that Einstein's brain contained more density of neurons due to the presence of more glial cells. Marian Diamond concluded that something should have happened in the life of Einstein which made the glial cells to grow in number.
To find out what happened, Diamond grew rats in two cages. In one cage the rats had plenty of food and water, with no opportunity to play or do anything exciting. In the other cage, the rats were given gadgets to play, get excited, run and the environment was quite challenging. When the rats died, Diamond examined the brains of both the rats. She found that the rats which and an enriched environment in addition to food, had a higher density of neurons and inter connections between them. Their brain was also larger in size! These rats also lived longer.
This finding of Marian Diamond pointed out that if the children were given stimulating and challenging environment, the inter connections between neurons develop resulting in an enriched brain substance. Thus, even though the number of neurons remained the same, the inter connections made a big difference in the quality of the brain matter.
How to create more Einsteins in our children?
Read further….
N C Sridharan and Radha Sridharan
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