Interesting and Fun Facts About The Brain

Every day, we learn something new about how our brain works. The field of neuroscience is still in its infancy, but it is evolving rapidly, turning yesterday’s brain facts into today’s brain myths. Our brain allows us to think, create and feel. And receive, store and recover memories. To deepen your mind, we’ve compiled some of the most interesting and fun facts about the brain supported by science. Some will make you stop and think, and some will fill you with admiration. Here we begin…

Your brain does a better creative job when you are tired.

This may sound crazy, but it actually makes sense when you look at the reason behind it. If you’re trying to do innovative work, you’ll actually have better luck when your brain isn’t working efficiently or when you’re more tired. In this case, your brain cannot filter out distractions and focus on a specific task.

You also need to remember the connections between concepts and ideas. This is good when it comes to innovative work, because this work requires us to make new connections, be open to new ideas, and think in new ways. Therefore, a tired brain is much more useful to us when we work on creative projects. That’s one of the reasons why great ideas get stuck in the soul after a long, hectic day.

Your passionate brain:

The goal of researcher Helen Fisher’s academic career has been to understand what happens in the minds of people who are deeply in love. She found that when they focus on the object of their affection, various parts of the brain begin to glow. She found that the caudate (part of the primitive reptilian brain) is very active in these people in love. Areas of the brain associated with the production of dopamine and norepinephrine light up. Both chemicals are associated with arousal and pleasurable activity. That’s why lovers talk all night or walk until dawn, change jobs or lifestyles, even die for each other.

Stress can alter the size of your brain:

Some studies have shown signs of decreased brain size due to stress. It’s very scary to think that prolonged stress can affect our brains in the long run. The study found that in mice that were chronically stressed, the hippocampus (an integral part of memory formation) in their brains actually shrank. Another study was done on monkeys that were removed from their mothers and cared for by their peers for 6 months. Areas of their brains associated with stress were still increased, even after being in normal social conditions for several months.

Parts of the brain:

if you cut a person’s brain in the middle, you get two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. There are four lobes in each hemisphere: the frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes. They specialize in performing certain actions, for example, the frontal lobe helps make decisions, while the occipital lobe specializes in vision. In addition, there are deeper structures in the brain, such as the limbic system, that are critical to long-term memory.

It is impossible for the brain to be multitasking:

Most people think they can do two or more tasks at the same time, but it turns out that multitasking is really impossible for the human mind. What we’re doing is called changing context – quickly switch between different actions, rather than performing them at the same time.

Aren’t these fun facts about the brain?

Sleep improves brain function:

We all know how important sleep is to our brain, but what about sleep? A series of short periods of sleep is really beneficial and can increase brain performance. This helps improve memory strength and makes learning better. According to recent research, the right side of the brain is much more active during naps than the left side.

The right side of the brain is always the most active hemisphere during sleep, despite the fact that 95% of people are right-handed and the left side of the brain is more dominant. The right side of the brain cleans up your temporary storage spaces, putting some information into long-term storage, solidifying your memories of the day, while the left side of the brain takes some time.

Trepanation:

An old surgical technique used to treat severe headaches involves drilling or scraping a hole into a person’s skull, brain disease or release an “evil spirit” from the head. An instrument called trefina is used to cut the round part of the skull bone, an extremely painful process.

The brain has a pleasure center:

it warns us when something is pleasurable and increases the desire to perform the same pleasurable action again. This is known as the reward scheme, which includes all kinds of pleasures, from sex to laughter and specific types of drug use.

Introversion and extroversion are the result of different brain connections:

There is a difference in the brain of introverts and extroverts. The difference is in how they process stimuli. The stimulation that enters our brain is processed differently depending on the individual. For introverts, stimuli run a long and complex path in areas of the brain associated with planning, memory and problem solving. Moreover, for extroverts, the path is much shorter. It passes through the area where the processing of taste, touch, visual and auditory perception occurs. In addition, the difference in the dopamine system in an extrovert’s brain leads them to seek news, take risks, and enjoy unknown or surprising situations more than others.

Make your brain think that time is slow:

By trying new things, you can train your brain to see time as moving slowly. It requires time for our brain to comprehend a lot of new information at once. The length of this time increases with the duration of the treatment. For instance, when we are forced to pay close attention due to a deadly or unintentional disease, we retain information longer because we log more experiences. On the other hand, time seems to move more quickly when the brain has nothing to think about. The same period of time will actually look shorter than the opposite. This typically occurs when you receive a lot of information that you’ve already processed.

Convolutions make us intelligent:

The surface of the human brain is sinuous due to deep cracks, grooves called convolutions, smaller grooves called grooves. This surface is known as the cerebral cortex and contains about 100 billion nerve cells. The curved, since surface allows the brain to become more, and thus processes more energy.

The smell of chocolate makes brain waves wild:

The smell of chocolate increases theta brain waves, which induces relaxation. It also increases the activity yof alpha and beta waves – alpha is most commonly seen in a relaxed but awake adult, while beta is seen when people are doing something like mental arithmetic.

Not all brain cells are equal:

Although there are 10,000 specific types of neurons in the brain, there are usually three general types of neurons: sensory neurons to transmit sensory information, motor neurons to transmit motor information and interneurons to transmit information between different types of neurons.

Most brain cells are not neurons:

Neurons make up only 10% of our brain cells. The other 90%, which represent half the weight of the brain, are called Gila (Greek for “glue”). The role of these anonymous cells ranges from clearing excess neurotransmitters, providing immune protection, stimulating and modulating the growth and function of synapses (connections between neurons).

Every time you create a memory, new neural connections are made in the brain.

A flexible and complex network made up of trillions of synapses in the human brain allows us to act, feel, and think. Deterioration of synapse due to neurotoxins or diseases has been associated with cognitive problems, mood swings and memory loss.

The brain never stop changing:

A 2007 study in a stroke patient shows that the adult brain may be able to create new neural pathways, just like in children. The visual center of the adult brain can recognize itself neutrally, overcoming damaged pathways and resulting in improved visual perception. In addition, research on meditation has shown that vigorous mental training can change both brain structure and function.

Male and female brains are similar:

Although male and female hormones affect brain development differently, and imaging studies have found differences in how men and women feel pain, deal with stress and make social decisions, to what extent these differences are genetic or shaped by experience is unknown. A study published in the Psychological Bulletin (January 2010) looked at about half a million girls and boys from 69 countries and found no overall gap in mathematical ability.

People who make mistakes are more pleasant:

According to the Pratfall effect, a person’s perceived attractiveness increases or decreases after they make a mistake. Essentially, those who never make mistakes are perceived as less attractive and pleasant than those who make occasional mistakes.

Weight

The average adult brain weighs between 1.2 kg and 1.4 kg, or about 2% of body weight, with a volume of about 1,130 cc in women and 1,260 cc in men. Of this, the dry weight is 60% fat, making your brain the fattest organ. About 80% of the contents of your skull is brain, and the rest is fluid that protects nerve tissue and cerebrospinal fluid. If you mixed all this brain fluid and blood, it would be about 1.7 liters.

The human brain contains trillions of synapses that are flexible and complex, allowing us to act, feel, and think.

A year of ageing can temporarily shrink the brain as much as an hour and a half of sweating. Researchers of the Institute Psychiatrists at King’s College London studied the brains of teenagers after 90 minutes of cycling. They found that very dressed cyclists lost about 1 kg of sweat and their brain tissue shrank. Also, only 5 minutes without oxygen can lead to brain damage.

Brain storage capacity.

The brain contains about 1 billion neurons, and each neuron makes about 1,000 connections to other neurons. They combine in such a way that each of them helps with many memories at the same time, exponentially increasing the amount of brain memory to 2.5 petabytes (to be exact). That means your brain can store 3 million hours of TV shows. You’d have to leave the TV on for over 300 years to use all that storage.

Memory is more an activity than a place:

A particular memory is deconstructed and distributed in different parts of our brain. When you remember, it is restored from separate fragments.

Brain Power:

Our resting metabolic rate (RMR), which is the entire amount of body energy used during a day of inactivity, is 20% of what the human brain requires. The brain uses 260 of the normal resting metabolic rate of 1,300 calories only to maintain itself. 1300 kcal per day is equal to 54.16 kcal per hour, which is equal to 15.04 grams of calories per second, or 62.93 joules per second, which is equal to 63 W (roughly), and 20% of 63 W is equal to 12.6 W, which means that your brain produces about 12 watts of electricity per hour. If your brain is engaged in a demanding or challenging endeavor, this can increase to 25 watts. This is sufficient to run a LED lamp with low power.

Continue to Fun Facts About The Brain:

Brain cells cannibalize:

When you don’t eat, hungry neurons in the brain begin to eat pieces of themselves. This act of self-destruction triggers a sign of hunger to induce food. That explains why it’s so hard to maintain a diet.

We use 100% of our brain.

Many people, including Albert Einstein, mistakenly claim that we use only 10% of our brains. The truth is that we use almost every part of the brain, and most parts remain active all the time (including during sleep). Most cells are used to control unconscious activities such as heartbeat, dreams, etc. Besides, there is no right brain or a left brain. Are we wrong or left? We’re the whole brain.

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Alcohol affects memory:

Alcohol primarily impairs the ability to form new long memories. With the increase in the amount of alcohol consumed, the degree of memory impairment also increases. If you’ve been drinking and you don’t remember what happened last night, it’s not because you forgot. Alcohol in the body has made your brain unable to form memories.

Reserved Brain:

The brain that is in your head is not the only brain you have. Your stomach has a “secondary brain” that influences your mood, what you eat, the types of diseases you catch and the decisions you make. It contains 100,000 neurons, and intestinal bacteria are responsible for producing more than 30 neurotransmitters, including serotonin “happy molecule”.

The story of Albert Einstein’s brain.

Before his death, Einstein requested that his body be completely cremated. But Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at Princeton University, removed his brain during an autopsy and kept it in a basement jar for 40 years. He cut his brain into pieces and sent it to different scientists for different studies. In 1999, they discovered that Einstein’s brain had unusual folds in the parietal lobe, a part of the brain associated with mathematical and spatial abilities. In addition, certain parts of his brain had more glial cells than neurons.

Growth

The brain grows at an incredible rate while developing – 250,000 neurons are added every minute. At 2 years old, the brain is about 80% of the adult size.

Quick Fun Facts About The Brain:

30. Brain information spreads at different speeds within different types of nerve cells. These signals can travel as slowly as about 1.5 km per hour or as fast as about 430 km per hour. In addition, nerve cells can transmit 1000 nerve impulses per second.
31. The world’s 4th most powerful supercomputer (developed by Japan) took 40 minutes to simulate just one second of human brain activity. The computer has 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM. Currently, there is no computer that can simulate the activity of an organ in real time, but Intel said it intends to launch such a machine by 2019.
32. According to the World Health Organization, prolonged use of a cell phone significantly increases the risk of brain tumors. However, the balance of current scientific evidence suggests that exposure to radio waves below the levels of international guidelines does not cause health problems for the general population.
33. The human brain also emits a quantifiable electrical wave like a radio transmitter. In fact, he keeps sending these signals for as long as 37 hours after passing away.
34. Although it processes all types of pain, the brain lacks pain receptors and cannot experience pain. We only use it as a tool to look for pain. This explains how painless brain surgery can be performed on a patient who is awake.
35. Every day, the average brain produces 25,000–50,000 thoughts. Most people’s thoughts are thought to be 70% negative on average. Additionally, your brain undergoes over 100,000 chemical reactions each second.

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