The secret of human intelligence may lie in the power of a single brain cell

What makes the human brain capable of language, imagination, mathematics and invention?

For many years, the prevailing view was that the secret of human intelligence lay mainly in scale: the sheer number of neurons in the human brain—close to 100 billion—and the vast network of connections among them.

But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that part of the answer may lie at a much smaller scale: in the extraordinary computational power of individual brain cells. ...