âWe are the laggard partner in this co-evolution.â âShe said that Newry's success is not through external help but through the energy of the people that âcaptured the imagination of the whole of Ireland and even cajoled the laggard politicians.ââ
One type of neuron called the Purkinje cell, found in the cerebellum, may have as many as one hundred thousand synapses.How big is a synapse? [ii]Synapses are very small. This narrow gap of extracellular space is approximately 20-40 nanometers (nm) wide. For an idea of scale, one inch is about 25.4 million nm long. The thickness of a single sheet of paper is about 100,000 nm.[iii]How many synapses are in the human brain?[iv][v]Current studies estimate that the average adult male human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons.
The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brainâs memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).