I’d like to explain how I visualize the workings of my own brain. At first glance, it’s just a big bag of neurons. People don’t seem to differ all that much in the actual weight of the brain. I take this to mean that there is not a lot of difference in the number of neurons, or that  such a number doesn’t tell us very much about the very great differences we see in the efficiency of people’s brains. The other real and quantifiable thing about the brain is its enormous number of synapses, which communicate between one “up stream” neuron and a number of “down stream” neurons. I picture the differences in “efficiency” or “power” of the brain to be a matter of how the neurons are wired together: the number of connections, the usefulness of the connections, the mysterious ability to make and break connections, which, from the perspective of the brain’s owner, emerge as ideas and associations between ideas. So, some people’s brains work better than others because of the way the are wired, or