20 Spectacular Facts About Your Brain for Your Brain
Carly Tennes
Published
08/27/2024
in
wow
It's bumpy. It's pinkish. It's full of electricity that makes us cry at bad commercials and laugh at our friends accidentally smacking themselves in the nuts. But even with these known oddities, the brain is a whole lot weirder than we initially realized — just ask the scientists tasked with researching it for themselves.
From our brain's insatiable hunger to whether (brain) size matters when it comes to the sexes, here are 20 spectacular facts about your brain.
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1.
“Our brain is constantly eating itself. This process is called phagocytosis where cells envelop and consume smaller cells or molecules to remove them from the system.” -
2.
“Magic mushrooms may give users trippy experiences by creating a hyperconnected brain. The active ingredient in the psychedelic drug, psilocybin, seems to completely disrupt the normal communication networks in the brain, by connecting ‘brain regions that don't normally talk together.’” -
3.
“The human brain has a theoretical capacity of 2.5 petabytes or 2.5 million gigabytes! If the brain worked like a DVR, it could record 3 million hours of video. It would have to recording for 300 continuous years just to use up all the space!” -
4.
“The brain releases so much dopamine during [climax] that a brain scan resembles that of someone on heroin.” -
5.
“If you wear a glass which vertically inverts your vision long enough, your brain will correct it and you'll see things normal. But when your take those glasses off, everything will look upside-down again until brain recalibrates again.” -
6.
“Einstein was born missing part of the brain that influences speech and did not speak until the age of three. However, his parietal lobe, responsible for math and spatial recognition, was abnormally large.” -
7.
“As the brain gets used to alcohol, it attempts to restore itself to a normal state in the presence of alcohol. If the influence of alcohol is suddenly removed, the brain has to readjust once again, leading to “the shakes” or increased anxiety.” -
8.
“A human being can remain perfectly functional after having an entire cerebral hemisphere removed. One patient completed college, attended graduate school and scored above average on intelligence tests, with literally only half a brain.” -
9.
“There are no pain receptors in the brain itself. Surgery can be done on the brain and technically the brain does not feel that pain. But the meninges (coverings around the brain), periosteum (coverings on the bones), and the scalp all have pain receptors and this is why you have migraines.” -
10.
“The popular sleep-aid Ambien has been shown to make paralyzed and brain-damaged people, who have been well past the point of recovery, spontaneously move and talk again because it can reconstruct neurons and make new connections in the brain.” -
11.
“Your brain burns 20% of your daily calories, despite only being 2% of your body mass.” -
12.
“At least one of the victims of the Vesuvius Eruption in 79 C.E was found with a vitrified brain. In other words their brain was turned to glass due to the extreme heat.” -
13.
“When you sleep your brain gets washed with spinal fluid” -
14.
“The most accurate simulation of the human brain ever has been carried out, but a single second’s worth of brain activity took one of the world’s largest supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate.” -
15.
“The flu hijacks your brain and makes you more sociable in the 48 hours before you get sick enough to realize you're infected.” -
16.
“The folds in the brain are a result of fitting more brain in the skull and if unfolded the human brain would be the size of a pillowcase.” -
17.
“The male brain is on average 9% larger than a female brain, even after correcting for body size.” -
18.
“In 2018, doctors found that a patient, Kendra Jackson, had a leaky brain for 5 years. After an accident in 2013, she had a daily runny nose for years and suffered headaches. She lost half a pint of brain fluid a day through her nose.” -
19.
“Human brains are getting larger. Study participants born in the 1970s had 6.6% larger brain volumes and almost 15% larger brain surface area than those born in the 1930s. The increased brain size may lead to an increased brain reserve, potentially reducing overall risk of age-related dementias.” -
20.
“[Adult content] triggers stronger brain reward responses than gaming or money, finds a new brain imaging study in healthy men.”
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