At your peak, your mind will contain: 100,000 BILLION BRAIN LINKS

Try to count like this: one million, two million, three million, and on, saying one number per second. Continue for about three years, and your counting is a pretty good representation of how fast our brains are forming new nerve links during the first years of life.

Ultimately, each of us forms more than 100,000 billion nerve links between the brain’s around 86 billion nerve cells.

The nerve cells and the communication between them is crucial for our mental capacities, and their rapid development during childhood helps us to understand the world and gain control over our bodies.

But the brain’s development doesn’t end after childhood. It continues throughout life, and its patterns have key consequences for everything from memory to logic.

In spite of the central role of brain cells in our everyday lives, scientists have so far been unable to map out their development across the brain throughout life. The brain’s almost infinite complexity has made it impossible to form a detailed, generalised view, but