By Michel J. Gimeno, M.D.

Amazing man. An amazing maze, this brain of ours. Its stark complexity baffles the imagination. Every year, for the past five years, there has been an average of 500,000 new scientific papers presented at Neuroscience conferences throughout the world. In its 17^th Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans in November, the Society For Neuroscience presented over 2,000 scientific papers! Indeed, we have come a long way. Just 10 years ago if you asked a neurologist how many brain cells we have, he would have replied, "about two billion or so." Now, we know the human brain contains about 110 billion neurons, not counting the glial cells. If that doesn't sound like much to you, consider: If we lived to be one hundred years old, and if we could count from the day we are born and never stop counting for a single second, we would never reach one billion. If we could build a computer containing 110 billion microchips, it would have to be one hundred stories