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Adam Creecy
Professor Smith
English 1302
5 February 2002
Just Sheer Naked Magic
What weighs about three pounds but has more parts than there are stars in the
Milky Way galaxy (Flieger)? What fills the space occupied by only three pints
of milk yet includes components that, laid end to end, would stretch several
hundred thousand miles (Diagram 19)? What looks like an oversized walnut
made of soft, grayish-pink cheese but contains the equivalent of 100 trillion tiny
calculators (Restak, Brain 27)? What, according to James Watson,
co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA, is "the most complex thing we
have yet discovered in our universe" (qtd. in Begley 66)? To all four of these
intriguing questions there is but one surprising answer: the human brain. This
miraculous organ is remarkable in its structure, its function, and its chemical
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composition.
What is the brain? According to Richard Restak,
the human brain is the master control center of the
body. The brain constantly receives information from
the senses ...