EVERYDAY SCIENCE

Detailed explanation-1: -Your cerebral cortex makes up about half of your brain’s total mass. Your cerebral cortex consists of six layers of nerve cells that contain between 14 billion and 16 billion nerve cells.

Detailed explanation-2: -For half a century, neuroscientists thought the human brain contained 100 billion nerve cells. But when neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel devised a new way to count brain cells, she came up with a different number-86 billion.

Detailed explanation-3: -Remarkably, the human cerebral cortex, which represents 82% of brain mass, holds only 19% of all neurons in the human brain – a fraction that is similar to the fraction that we observed in several other primates, rodents, and even insectivores (Figure 1).