brain amazing facts

  1. The brain makes up about 2% of a human’s body weight
  2. The brain weighs about 3 pounds
  3. 75% of the brain is water
  4. 85% of the brain is the cerebrum
  5. The brain is the fattest organ in the body
  6. At age 18, your brain typically stops growing
  7. Stress alters brain cells, and function
  8. Dreaming requires more brain activity than any other activity we do when we’re awake
  9. Music improves brain organization
  10. Your brain cannot feel pain—a headache involves nerves and muscles in your head.  It is the single organ in the human body that lacks nerves. This is why surgeons can perform brain surgery on a patient while they are still awake.
  11. There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your brain. The distance around the world at the equator is 24,900 miles. That’s enough to wrap around the Earth four times!
  12. Every time you recall a memory or have a new thought, you create a connection in the brain
  13. The average person has 70,000 thoughts per day
  14. When our eyes receive images, they are upside-down. Our brain automatically adjusts them so that we see images right side-up
  15. Though studies have shown that the male brain is on average up to 10% larger than a female’s brain, it has been proven that female’s brains have more nerve cells and connectors which enables it to work more efficiently
  16. When we are awake, the brain generates enough energy to power a light bulb
  17. Seafood is considered one of the best foods for the brain. The fatty acid present in most seafood and fish can improve memory function by about 15%
  18. Alcohol interferes with brain processes by weakening connections between neurons
  19. Altitude can make the brain see strange visions—these effects are attributed to the reduced supply of oxygen to the brain
  20. Memories triggered by scent have a stronger emotional connection
  21. Each time we blink, our brain kicks in and keeps things illuminated so everything around us doesn’t go dark each time—we blink about 20,000 times per day.
  22. A living brain is so soft you could cut it with a butter knife
  23.  Children who learn two languages before they turn five have much denser gray matter than adults – they literally build bigger brains
  24. The human brain is divided into two hemispheres: the left and the right. A strange fact is that the left side of your brain actually controls the right side of your body, and vise versa. The left brain contains regions involving speech and language and is associated with mathematical calculation and fact retrieval. The right brain plays a role in visual and auditory processing, spatial skills and artistic ability, though these functions involve both hemispheres.
25.  The brain produces a half cup of fluid every day. It floats in this bath of cerebrospinal fluid which acts as a shock absorber to keep the brain from being crushed by its own weight.

26. The human brain is capable of 1,016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any existing computer.

27. Researchers involved in the AI Impacts project have developed a way to compare supercomputers to brains — by measuring how fast a computer can move information around within its own system. By this standard, the human brain is 30 times more powerful than the IBM Sequoia, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

28.  The human brain is extraordinarily complex and consequently can go awry in some spectacular ways. Some of the strangest disorders include exploding head syndrome disorder (hearing phantom explosions in your head), Capgras syndrome (thinking loved ones have been substituted by impostors, robots or aliens), and Cotard’s syndrome (believing you are dead).