The primer quickly grew to 2,000 pages and has yet to be published. Although it doesn't qualify as a beach read, it does make brain research accessible to readers willing to give their neuronal circuitry a healthy workout. Ultimately, new discoveries about how the brain learns, remembers, perceives and guides behavior are expected to transform medicine, education and our very sense of what it means to be human. These advances are all the more remarkable when you consider that the brain is the most complex object that we know of in the universe, with more possible ways to wire its 100 billion neurons than there are atoms in the universe. That complexity, according to Ratey, is one of the keys to its flexibility, and the reason we shouldn't assume we're prisoners of our genes.
Genes just determine the limits of possibility.
The rest is up to us. The brain's malleability has exciting ramifications for medical treatment. Ratey says there's growing hope that damaged neurons could be induced to regenerate to repair damage from Parkinson's disease, strokes and Alzheimer's disease. But he cautions that there are limits to the brain's adaptability. Learning is easier early in life, and certain developmental milestones, such as language, depend on windows of opportunity that close after a certain developmental age.