THE BRAIN AND MEMORY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XII, Issue XI, 10 March 1894, Page 224

THE BRAIN AND MEMORY.

What is the brain like, in its capacity of storehouse ! and what should we see if we could reduce our stature to infinitesimal proportions and travel along the corridors of the brain ’ Does it contain galleries of pictures ’ Is it furnished with shelves and pigeon-holes for the classification and care of records and messages ? It is impossible to conceive what kind of apparatus or fittings can at once be suitable for storing up pictures and sounds, and all the varieties of impressions received from all the senses, writes a contributor to Cassell's Family Magazine. Nor can we discover any curious machinery, even with the microscope, for the structure of the grey matter is so minute as to defy the powers of the lens ; and all that we can detect is an agglomeration of minute cells. A calculation has been made regarding the number of these brain cells. It is assumed that every thought or perception is a separate lodger in the mind, requiring an apartment of the brain to itself ; and the cells are the apartments. We have to provide accommodation for all the incidents ot our everyday life, for all we read in the daily papers, for all that oir schoolmasters crammed into us, and all that we have learned since. How is this possible in one small skull? Our conception is assisted by photography, which can print the Lord’s Prayer so small that it requires a powerful microscope to read it. Surely, then, minute portions of the brain may contain a great deal ’ The cells vary in size from one three-hundredth of an inch in diameter to one three-thousandth; and, this being known, it is not difficult to estimate the entire number of them in the brain. Dr. Hooke, the mathematician, said 3,155,760,000; but, according to Maynert’s calculation, the number of cerebral cells is only 600,000.000. Seeing that the doctors differ, let us use the slate and pencil ourselves. The thinking power of the brain is believed to reside in the grey matter of the surface This is a sheet of cellnlar nerve substance, which is crumpled into convolutions through being