Your brain, command central for every move, thought and action, is more densely wired than any machine man could ever design. Your brain’s nerve cells, called neurons, are relaying messages at lightning speed every second of your life. Sam Wang, associate professor of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at Princeton, points out the miraculous structure of this system in his book, Welcome to Your Brain. One cubic centimeter of brain matter—about a thimbleful—holds about 50 million neurons and several hundred miles of axons, the long, thin projection of the neuron that conducts impulses away from the cell body. It also contains several hundred miles of dendrites, the branched projections on a neuron that take in impulses from other cells. That tiny cube of brain matter would have about one trillion synaptic connections between axons and dendrites.

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