THE ‘MOST EXTRAORDINARY THING IN THE UNIVERSE’

The brain is surprisingly soft. Lift it out of its skull, Bryson writes, and the consistency runs from tofu to “slightly overcooked Jell-O pudding.” Yet, even when we sit doing nothing, “your brain churns through more information in 30 seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in 30 years.”

The brain makes up just two per cent of our body weight but uses 20 per cent of our energy. “In newborn infants, it’s no less than 65 per cent. That’s partly why babies sleep all the time — their growing brains exhaust them.” The pattern of sulci and gyri, the folds and depressions in our brains, is uniquely individual, “as distinctive as your fingerprints.”