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The human brain has created and invented the myriad achievements that surround us every day—skyscrapers, computers, complex economic markets, advances in medical science ranging from vaccines to antibiotics to magnetic resonance scanners, an understanding of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and art, music, and literature. These achievements have been accomplished because the human brain is one of the most complex systems in the universe. Composed of more than 100 billion neurons (more nerve cells than the stars in the Milky Way), the brain expands its communicating and thinking power by multiplying connectivity through an average of 1,000–10,000 synapses per nerve cell. The synapses are “plastic” in that they remodel themselves continuously in response to changes in their environment and the inputs that they receive.
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