[reverett123]

As you know, I have become enamored (OK, maybe obsessed ) with the hypothesis that PD can be traced back to events prior to our birth. In particular, exposure to certain chemicals during critical "windows" of development that might only be "open" for minutes or hours.

One has to wonder just how much could go wrong in minutes. Well, I just read something in a most unlikely source- a Reader's Digest book called "Making the Most of Your Brain." Admitting to a certain snobbery toward RD over the years, I must admit that their books often make up for their "condensed" novels.

When an embryo is developing those critical parts it is producing a quarter-million cells each minute! If anything goes wrong at those speeds it isn't hard to believe that it could go VERY wrong. It also drives home the importance of expectant mothers' nutrition and avoiding alcohol, etc. Lordy, what a piece of work is Man....

Another factoid from the same source: We have 100,000,000,000 neurons and each has up to 1,000 docking points where it can connect to others. If all the permutations were hooked up the number of connections would be greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

And one more about the prenatal environment: "The brain is so sensitive to its environment that even identical twins have visible differences in brain structure by the time they are born."

Amazing.