The human brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. It has taken hundreds of millions of years of evolution to construct, and over the last seven million years, it has tripled in size. It weighs little more than a bag of sugar, but packed inside it are 86 billion neurones, linked together by over 100 trillion connections in a network more powerful than even the most advanced supercomputers ever built.
By far the largest part of the human brain is the forebrain, and like the brains of other mammals, it is covered in a thick layer of neurones known as the cerebral cortex. But in humans, this layer has been massively expanded. The human cerebral cortex has 1,000 times as many neurones as the same structure in a mouse, and it has not yet stopped evolving.
The smallest processing units in the cortex are known as neocortical columns, where each contains thousands of different connections. Over the course of evolution, these neocortical columns
