"The Brain gives the heart its sight. The heart gives the brain its vision." - Kall
By Patrick Driessen
Achieving success in something often depends - to a large degree - on how smart and fast you use your brain power! Thus understanding, training, expanding and nurturing your brain capacity might help you to succeed more often.
Over the last week I did a little ‘brain test’: I asked 10 adult friends and 10 children (10-16 yrs) to tell me everything they knew about their brain. Funny enough most of them really struggled trying to answer my ‘simple’ question. Most of the answers I got were quite general and could be qualified as ‘no-brainers’... My test audience admitted that they were lacking in-depth knowledge and facts about our brain.
To help all of us to increase our knowledge and understanding of our brain, please find below 50 compelling and proven facts about our mysterious brain:
By Patrick Driessen
Achieving success in something often depends - to a large degree - on how smart and fast you use your brain power! Thus understanding, training, expanding and nurturing your brain capacity might help you to succeed more often.
Over the last week I did a little ‘brain test’: I asked 10 adult friends and 10 children (10-16 yrs) to tell me everything they knew about their brain. Funny enough most of them really struggled trying to answer my ‘simple’ question. Most of the answers I got were quite general and could be qualified as ‘no-brainers’... My test audience admitted that they were lacking in-depth knowledge and facts about our brain.
To help all of us to increase our knowledge and understanding of our brain, please find below 50 compelling and proven facts about our mysterious brain:
- You btteer bleivee it your biarn is clever, jsut try and see if you can raed tihs, most likely you can. Tihs is bcuseae the mind deos not raed all lteters, only the word as a wlhoe aoccdring to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinvresity. – Great isn’t it? According to the research, as long as the first and the last letter of a word are in the right place, it doesn’t matter if the rest of them are jumbled up: most people will still be able to read and understand the text.
- One human brain generates more electrical impulses in a single day than all the world's telephones put together. Every thought and pattern of light, sound, movement, smell and sensation is converted into a sequence of electric pulses, which is received and translated by your brain.
- Your brain needs a continuous supply of oxygen. A 10 minute loss of oxygen will usually cause significant neural damage. Cold can lengthen this time, which is why cold-water drowning victims have been revived after as much as 40 minutes — without brain damage.
- Your brain uses a fifth of all the blood in your body. It needs it to keep up with the heavy metabolic demands of its neurons. It needs not only the glucose that is delivered by the blood, but of course, the oxygen too.
- Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen that enters your bloodstream. The brain only makes up about 2% of our body mass, yet consumes more oxygen than any other organ in the body, making it extremely susceptible to damage related to oxygen deprivation. So breathe deep to keep your brain happy and swimming in oxygenated cells.
- Your brain feels no pain. There are no nerves that register pain within the brain itself. Because of this, neurosurgeons can probe the brain while a patient is conscious. By doing this, they can use feedback from the patient to identify important regions such as those used for speech or visualisation. Although the brain itself does not have pain receptors and cannot feel pain, that doesn’t mean your head can’t hurt. The brain is surrounded by loads of tissues, nerves and blood vessels that are plenty receptive to pain and can give you a pounding headache.
- The cerebellum is sometimes called the “little brain” and weighs about 150 grams (a little over five ounces). Found at the lower rear of your brain. Your cerebellum enables you to maintain posture, to walk and to perform coordinated movements. It may also play a role in your sense of smell.
- Not gray, but pink! Your brain isn’t the firm, gray mass you’ve seen on TV. Living brain tissue is a squishy, pink and jelly-like organ thanks to the loads of blood and high water content of the tissue. So the next time you’re feeling dehydrated get a drink to keep your brain hydrated.
- An elephant's brain is huge; about six times as large as a human brain. However, in relation to body size, humans have the largest brain of all the animals, averaging about 2% of body weight. A cat's brain weighs about one ounce, a little over 1% of body weight. I wonder if an ant has a brain. They’re quite clever, I think.
- The brain is much more active at night than during the day. Logically, you would think that all the moving around, complicated calculations and tasks and general interaction we do on a daily basis during our working hours would take a lot more brain power than, say, lying in bed. Turns out, the opposite is true. When you turn off your brain turns on. Scientists don’t yet know why this is but you can thank the hard work of your brain while you sleep for all those pleasant dreams.
- The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Or any other encyclopaedia for that matter. Scientists have yet to settle on a definitive amount, but the storage capacity of the brain in electronic terms is thought to be between 3 or even 1,000 terabytes. The National Archives of Britain, containing over 900 years of history, only takes up 70 terabytes, making your brain’s memory power pretty darn impressive.
- New connections. Every time you recall a memory or have a new thought, you are creating a new connection in your brain.
- On average you have about 100 billion neurons. Pity they’re not always in action. However, you'll be happy about that after reading the next item.
- You loose approximately 85,000 neurons every day of your life. Fortunately, this goes unnoticed due to the superfluous supply of neurons with which we are endowed; and the fact that even after three years this loss adds up to less than 1% of the total.
- Recent research proves that your brain continues to produce new neurons throughout your life. Scientists refer to this as brain plasticity or neuro-plasticity. It has also been proven that neuro-plasticity increases in response to stimulation.
- Dream! Scientists say the higher your I.Q. the more you dream. While this may be true, don’t take it as a sign you’re mentally lacking if you can’t recall your dreams. Most of us don’t remember many of our dreams and the average length of most dreams is only 2-3 seconds–barely long enough to register. Most people have an average of 4-7 dreams each night. Five minutes after a dream, half of the dream is forgotten. Ten minutes after a dream, over 90% is forgotten. Write down your dreams immediately if you want to remember them.
- Create associations. Memory is formed by associations, so if you want help remembering things, create associations for yourself.
- When you are stressed, feeling hostile or angry, your brain releases a chemical known as Cortisol, which inhibits learning. So to learn effectively, you will need to be stress free within a stress free environment.
- Laughing. Laughing at a joke is no simple task as it requires activity in five different areas of the brain.
- Food and intelligence. A study of one million students in New York showed that students who ate lunches that did not include artificial flavors, preservatives, and dyes did 14% better on IQ tests than students who ate lunches with these additives.
- Music. It is proven that music can synchronise your brain waves, improve your mood and help you to learn more efficiently. Music lessons have shown to considerably boost brain organization and ability in both children and adults.
- Boredom. Boredom is brought on by a lack of change of stimulation, is largely a function of perception, and is connected to the innate curiosity found in humans.
- Brain size at birth. At birth, your brain was almost the same size as an adult brain and contained most of the brain cells for your whole life. A newborn baby’s brain grows about three times its size in the first year. (FYI: Your brain stopped growing at age 18).
- Yawning keeps your brain cool. It is thought that a yawn works to send more oxygen to the brain, therefore working to cool it down and wake it up.
- Stimulation. A stimulating environment for a child can make the difference between a 25% greater ability to learn or 25% less in an environment with little stimulation. So this investment has a high return on the learning investment!
- Reading aloud stimulates child brain development. Reading aloud to children helps stimulate brain development, yet only 50% of infants and toddlers are routinely read to by their parents.... Missed opportunity!
- Every brain has a soundtrack. Its tempo and tone will vary, depending on mood, frame of mind, and other features of the brain itself. When that soundtrack is recorded and played back - to an emergency responder, or a firefighter - it may sharpen their reflexes during a crisis, and calm their nerves afterward.
- Working memory stores 7 digits. It's no accident that telephone numbers in many countries are seven digits long. Our working memory, a very short-term form of memory which stores ideas just long enough for us to understand them, can hold on average a maximum of seven digits. This allows you to look up a phone number and remember it just long enough to dial.
- Physical illness. The connection between body and mind is a strong one. One estimate is that between 50-70% of visits to the doctor for physical ailments are attributed to psychological factors.
- Blinking. Each time we blink, our brain kicks in and keeps things illuminated so the whole world doesn’t go dark each time we blink (about 20,000 times a day).
- Reading faces. Without any words, you may be able to determine if someone is in a good mood, is feeling sad, or is angry just by reading the face. A small area in the brain called the Amygdala is responsible for your ability to read someone else’s face for clues to how they are feeling.
- Decision-making. Women tend to take longer to make a decision, but are more likely to stick with the decision, compared to men, who are more likely to change their mind after making a decision.
- Tickles. You can’t tickle yourself because your brain distinguished between unexpected external touch and your own touch.
- Baby talk increases their vocabulary. A study showed that when mothers frequently spoke to their infants, their children learned about 300 more words by age two than did children whose mothers rarely spoke to them.
- 3 = the weight of your brain in pounds (1.360777 kilograms). Albert Einstein's brain may have been smaller than yours, because he was smaller than average. There is a general correlation between body size and the size of our brains. (FYI: Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain).
- 273 Kilometer per hour: Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 273 km/170 miles per hour. So if you have ever wondered how you can react so fast to things around you or why that stubbed toe hurts right away; it’s due to the super-speedy movement of nerve impulses from your brain to the rest of your body and vice versa, bringing reactions at the speed of a high powered luxury sports car.
- 4 to 6 = the number of minutes your brain can survive without oxygen before it starts to die. No oxygen for 5 to 10 minutes will result in permanent brain damage. Don’t test it!
- 8 to 10 = the number of seconds you have before losing consciousness due to blood loss.
- 10 to 23 = the number of watts of power your grain generates when you’re awake (that’s enough to turn on a light bulb!). Don’t save your brainpower to much, it will fuse!
- Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons. Not all neurons are the same. There are a few different types within the body and transmission along these different kinds can be as slow as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec.
- 75%-80% of the brain is water.
- 160.000 KM / 100,000 miles: total length of blood vessels in one human brain. If they were stretched out, they would circle the earth more than four times.
- 1.000 to 10.000 = the number of synapses for each neuron in your brain.
- Each person has about the same number of brain cells at birth as in adulthood, but those cells grow, reaching maximum size at about age six.
- Using brain imaging data, it is possible to tell whether a person is thinking about a face or a place.
- Bilingual brains. Children who learn two languages before the age of five alters the brain structure and adults have a much denser gray matter.
- Your brain is composed mostly of fat and needs the right kind of that fat as fuel so that it can function efficiently. This is why oily fish or fish oil containing Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) is so important in the diet; your brain needs it to run smoothly, but cannot produce it. Especially the Omega-3 fatty acid is an important ingredient for optimal brain function: It is a rich source of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), a fatty acid that is found in high concentration in the gray matter of the brain. DHA is instrumental in the function of brain cell membranes, which are important for the transmission of brain signals. By making cell membranes more fluid, Omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA, improve communication between the brain cells. Hence the healthy advise to take food & supplements containing Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids.
- Brain Bank. Harvard University maintains a Brain Bank where over 7,000 human brains are stored for research purposes.
- Thoughts. The average number of thoughts that humans are believed to experience each day is 70,000.
- Keep exercising your brain, because mental activity stimulates the creation of new neurons throughout your whole life. For useful insights and tips, please read Boost Your Brain Power!.
When you have finished reading about these fun facts, please take this short brainpower quiz and see how much you learned about the human brain.
"Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Warm regards & success,
Patrick
