Your Brain Is Extremely Powerful
The human brain is responsible for keeping your body running all day long. It not only helps people think and learn new things, but it also controls your movement and speech, too. The brain is part of the central nervous system and receives tons of information. Make some room in your noggin for these surprising brain facts you need to know.
Dreams And The Human Brain
We know that our brain stays active even when weare sleeping. Typically, people in ancient times would think that when yousleep, you are almost dead as your brain is not functioning. However, with the advancementof modern medical science, we know that it is not true.
Interestingly, dreams are proof that your brainkeeps working even if you are asleep. It is thought that dreams are a result ofthe combination of neurological factors, psychological factors, and our imagination.
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 . 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? Were the whole brain.
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The Total Length Of Blood Vessels In The Brain Is Around 400 Miles
The capillary bed of the brain, or its network of arteries and blood vessels, is extremely dense. Its so dense that the total length of these capillaries adds up to about 400 miles when laid end to end. Thats the equivalent of over 7,000 football fields!
The brain gets all its blood from two sources: the internal carotid arteries by the neck and the vertebral arteries of the spine. At any given moment, there are about 100 to 130 milliliters of blood in the brain. Thats about half a cup of blood.
Brain Facts Update: Myths Debunked
Rapid advancements in neuroscience mean that information gets outdated fast.
This is one reason that theres a lot of misinformation and myths floating around about the brain.
New evidence has shown that these commonly accepted brain facts are not true.
32. Youve probably heard that attention spans are getting shorter.
And that the average persons attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.
This fun but alarming fact turns out to not be true.
Theres no evidence that human attention spans are shrinking or that goldfish have particularly short attention spans either.
33. The popular myth that we use only 10% of our brains is flat-out wrong.
Brain scans clearly show that we use most of our brain most of the time, even when were sleeping.
34. There is no such thing as a left-brain or right-brain personality/skill type.
We are not left-brained or right-brained we are all whole-brained.
35. In spite of what youve been told, alcohol does not kill brain cells.
What excessive alcohol consumption can do is damage the connective tissue at the end of neurons.
36. The Mozart effect has been debunked.
While listening to certain kinds of music can improve memory and concentration, theres nothing unique about listening to Mozart.
37. You may have heard that we have more brain cells than there are stars in the Milky Way, and while this is a beautiful sentiment, it is not an accurate one.
38. Its often said that there are 10,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain.
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Sleep Deprivation Can Affect The Brain In Many Ways
Theres a reason that a solid seven to nine hours of sleep per night is recommended: Your body and your brain require rest in order to function properly, retain memory, and react in a timely manner. Judgment is even impaired when a human has not had a proper nights rest. Sleep deprivation kills brain cells, can create psychosis if long enough, and will reduce the ability of the body and the brain to heal, says Brock. All of these things can impact cognition, judgment, or reaction time. If you found these brain facts mind-boggling, check out some more amazing trivia about the human body.
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 extroverts brain leads them to seek news, take risks, and enjoy unknown or surprising situations more than others.
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The Part Of The Brain Responsible For Memory Is Significantly Larger In Taxi Drivers
There’s no app that can replace the knowledge and memory of a good cab driver, as scientists from University College London discovered.
When they scanned the brains of regular people and compared the results to brain scans of London cab drivers, the researchers found that the cab drivers had much larger hippocampi.
The hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory. The process of learning to navigate around the complex streets of London had literally altered the brains of the drivers.
The Brain Consumes 20 Percent Of The Bodys Energy
Although the adult brain only takes up about one to three percent of your entire body weight, it uses up about 20 percent of your entire bodys energy storage. This makes sense, considering how hard it works to keep you in check at any given moment.
Processing and transmitting information through electrical signals take up a lot of power. About 25 percent of this power is used for maintaining neurons, and the other 75 percent is used for sending and receiving signals in the brain circuits.
So, how does the brain stay in shape to handle all this work? Healthy circulation can come from cardio exercise and nutrients can come from the foods we eat, but the brain’s primary method of maintaining its own health is the repair work that occurs during a good nights sleep. Sleep is important for many brain functions, including how nerve cells communicate.
Your brain is more active than you may think when youre in deep sleep. It sort of goes into housekeeping mode, working to remove toxins that have built up while youre awake, while alsoworking to consolidate memories into long-term storage and help you more permanently retain the information youve learned through the day.
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What Are Some Amazing Things Your Brain Can Do
8 Things You Can Do With Your Mind That Seem Like Magic
- Build muscle just by thinking about it.
- Learn an instrument by imagining to play it.
- Become a chess genius without touching a chess board.
- Use your long-term memory to become a human calculator.
- Boost endurance by doing mental puzzles while exercising.
How The Brain Recalls A Memory
The memories of our brain are stored in thehippocampus. However, our brain is not so great at recalling memories.Typically, when you want to recall a memory, your brain repeats a similarneural pattern that generated in the time of the original event. So, every timeyou recall something, your brain is living the moment again.
But, chances are that the memory might not alwaysbe entirely accurate compared to the real event. For instance, you might know aparticular word that you couldnt recall at a given moment. But, later, youmight remember it easily without any issue.
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Most Of Your Neurons Live With You All Your Life
The neurons you’re born with are mostly the neurons you have when you die, so these cells live with you your entire life. Throughout your lifetime, these brain cells accrue genetic mutations and in an adult individual it is thought that the genomes of seemingly all neurons in the brain are unique. Dr Randall Platt, ETH Zurich
Your Brain Activity Is As Unique As Your Fingerprints
Research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that a persons brain activity may be as unique as his or her own fingerprints. To reach their conclusion, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging to create connectivity profiles, which allowed researchers to identify the brain activity of more than 100 individuals. Learning about individual brain connections offered scientists specific insights about an individuals intelligence or personality, explains Dr. McQuiston. This could have implications for how scanning brains might be used in the future to one day help individualize care for each unique person.
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Summing Up Amazing Facts About The Human Brain
The human brain is a fascinating thing. With theadvancement of science and technology, we have learned plenty of things about thebrain. Yet, we have a whole lot to understand and learn about this mysteriouspart of our body.
Anyway, it is evident that if you want your brain to perform better, then you should exercise, eat a healthy diet, drink lots of fluid, and get a good sleep regularly. We hope you enjoyed all these interesting facts about the human brain above and that they would be beneficial to you. Plus, you can also read our post on some fascinating facts about the human body.
So, do you know any more exciting facts about the human brain? If so, why dont you leave it in the comment section below?
Facts About The Brain
The brain is one of the most amazing and important organs of the human body. It is the command center and the only part of the body, which helps us learn, think and remember different things. It is the central organ of the human nervous system, which is primarily involved in relaying information between the brain and the body. The brain receives input through signals from the sensory organs.
There are many amazing facts about the brain that we are not aware of. Some interesting brain facts are given below.
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The Brain Needs To Forget In Order To Function Properly
People tend to think of forgetting as being a pathology, but forgetting is adaptive as it is not good to remember every single thing that happened to you.
There are people that have these amazing episodic memories, but they tend to lose the ability to extract general principles of this memory. They see the trees, and not the forest, basically. And so it is not a good thing to remember every single detail. Professor Sheena Josselyn,Neurosciences & Mental Health program at The Hospital for Sick Children
The Incredible Shrinking Brain
Brain volume has been decreasing over the past 20,000 years. Male brains have lost a tennis ball size area of brain, and women have lost the same amount proportionality. Two beliefs have sprung up around this discovery. The first is that were getting dumber. The second is that were becoming more efficient. We like to think its the second option, but until more time is spent on research, the jury is still out on this one.4
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Neuroscience Facts: 30+ Interesting Things To Know About The Brain
by Nirvanium | Neuroscience
Your brain is deciphering and interpreting each letter that you currently see on this screen. This is something which youre aware of and not at the same time. Is it you that is aware or is it your brain? Is there a difference between you and the brain? Most people take themselves to be someone or something that is not just confined to the electrochemical soup located within the skull.
That being said, one thing that cannot be denied is that the magnificent and highly complex organ that is the brain is responsible for every conscious experience that you have as an individual. All the sensations, feelings and thoughts, colours and sounds, tastes and smells, highs and lows, twists and turns is processed, interpreted and manifested into reality by the brain.
In this article weve decided to compile a big list of interesting facts related to the brain and neuroscience:
Brains Never Stop Changing
Scientific wisdom once held that once you hit adulthood, your brain lost all ability to form new neural connections. This ability, called plasticity, was thought to be confined to infancy and childhood.
Wrong. A 2007 study on a stroke patient found that her brain had adapted to the damage to nerves carrying visual information by pulling similar information from other nerves. This followed several studies showing that adult mice could form new neurons. Later studies found more evidence of human neurons making new connections into adulthood meanwhile, research on meditation showed that intense mental training can change both the structure and function of the brain.
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Speed At Which Information Transfers In The Brain
As previously mentioned, the human brain contains about 86 billion neurons on average. These neurons transfer signals across synapses. And, we know that there are about 18 to 32 trillion synapses in the brain.
And, the neurons send out the signals across synapses about 0.1 to 2 times per second. If you calculate that, then it would be that our brain is processing about 18 to640 trillion signals per second. That is extremely fast, isnt it?
Things That Can Go Right With Brains
Individuals with a severed corpus callosum, the broad band of nerve fibers between the two brain hemispheres, can when blindfolded simultaneously draw a circle with one hand and a square on the other hand. This is something most of us normal folks cannot do. Im not sure the practical benefits of this peculiar skill except perhaps playing the piano or something artistic like that
Synesthesia is when the brain goes crazy in a magical way. Its a condition where the stimulation of one sense automatically activates a perception of another sense. In other words people who have synesthesia might smell sounds, taste words and see different colours in numbers.
Meditation can literally change the actual structure of the brain as was concluded by Sara Lazar, Ph. D.: We found people who had never meditated before and we scanned them and then we put them through an 8-week meditation program and then we scanned them again. And we were able to show that in just 8 weeks we were able to detect changes in brain structure.
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Extreme Dieting May Lead Your Brain To Eat Itself
If you feel like your brain is trying to sabotage your dieting efforts, you might be right.
Scientists have discovered that not eating enough can trigger something called “starvation-induced autophagy” in the brain. Essentially, brain cells that aren’t getting enough energy from food begin to eat themselves in order to release fatty acids. When that happens, the report suggested that the brain cranks up hunger signals that boost appetite and the desire to eat.
Though some amount of autophagy is actually important to keep the brain running smoothly, long-term malnutrition could have a negative impact on the brain.
Fascinating Facts About Your Amazing Brain
Your brain is a mystery only it can solve. Unraveling the riddle of how your bodys command center worksperception, the formation of thoughts, memory creation, and moremight seem like daunting, headache-inducing work.
But your brain is up to the task. Every second of the day it takes in so much information. Then it links disparate parts to make a whole thought, decision, memory, or picture of your world. Your brain is the ultimate processing unit, taking factsfrom senses, chemical messages, or other stimuliand spitting out a conclusion.
So, if youre going to demystify your brain, its probably best to lay out the facts first. And your amazing brain will do the rest of the work putting the puzzle together.
Here are 41 facts about brain anatomy, perception, thoughts, memory, and healthy habits for your brain:
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The Human Attention Span Is Shorter Than A Goldfish
Research shows that the average attention span has decreased by an average 12 minutes over the last 10 years. Today, the human attention span is shorter than a goldfish. Studies have even shown some links between device multi-tasking for example, if youre scrolling through social media while watching TV and declining attention spans.
History Of The Human Brain
The brain size of our distant ancestors is comparable to the apes of today, as deducted from the study of the famous Lucy fossil .
The human brain have nearly tripled in size across seven million years, most of the growth have has been taking place during these past 2 million years.
In the last 10 000 20 000 years the brain has been shrinking which could be due to limited nutrition in agricultural populations and/or related to the fact that the average human body size has also shrunk in size over the last 10 000 years.
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