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There is no scientific evidence to suggest that we use only 10% of our brains.Neuroscientists, of course, already know that. But are there other false beliefs about the brain? Brain Mythology is a new column in the journal Brain Structure and Function, edited by Laszlo Zaborszky and Karl Zilles. In the first installment, Hilgetag and Barbas (2009) ask the question, Are there ten times more glia than neurons in the brain?
Neuroscience students take it for granted that there are many more glia than neurons in the brain. Neuroscience textbooks state with confidence: “Although there are many neurons in the human brain…, glia outnumber neurons by tenfold” (Bear et al. 2006) or, not to be outdone, even by “10–50 times”, as claimed in another text (Kandel et al. 2000). This fact is happily invoked by gliologists to promote the status of their field.Damn those status-conscious gliologists! They've been leading us astray!
Given this well-accepted figure, we were surprised when our cell counts in the prefrontal cortex of the rhesus monkey turned up a glia-to-neuron ratio (GNR) of just about 1 (Dombrowski et al. 2001). There was some regional variation, but no prefrontal area had a GNR larger than 1.2. Maybe the proportion of glia is very different in other cortical regions or other parts of the brain, so that the overall ratio for the whole brain is much larger than 1? Classic studies, however, conducted by O’Kusky and Colonnier (1982) in the opposite pole of the brain, the visual cortex, had reported an even lower GNR of 0.5.

Since the number of synapses increases faster than the number of neurons in larger brains, this affiliation of glia with the multitude of neural connection points may help explain... For example, in large brains such as the human brain... there may be as many as 1.4 astrocytes for each neuron, up from 0.33 in the rodent cortex (Nedergaard et al. 2003). Even that ratio, however, is still a long way from the myth of 10 times more glia than neurons, in any species.Those species include humans of course, who are like monkeys with a nearly perfect 1:1 neuron:glia ratio [as noted by Jason Snyder].


Google has had a busy week. Not only did they release Google Earth version 5.1 and then release new imagery for many parts of the world, but today they added two more cities in 3D:Copenhagen, Denmark and Marseilles, France.
The addition of Copenhagen is very timely, as Google just recently released some tools in preparation for the COP15 climate change conference in Copenhagen. Oddly, though, the building that will house the conference (the Bella Center) was a bit too far away from downtown to get modeled.
To view these or any other 3D buildings, make sure you turn on the 3D Buildings layer inside of Google Earth. [...]

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