How changeable is your brain?
Your brain changes throughout your life. Every experience you have will impact on the structure of your brain. A changing brain enables us to learn, remember and adapt to our surroundings. At birth, a baby’s brain contains 100 billion neurons, roughly the number of stars in the Milky Way. Before birth, the brain produces these neurons and the connections between them known as synapses. During the first years of life, the brain undergoes a series of extraordinary changes. In your teenage years the brain undergoes a pruning process, eliminating connections that are seldom or never used.