Brain Trivia

1. Physical Attributes
 Your brain is composed of approximiately 75 percent of water.
 There are no pain receptors in your brain, so your brain can feel no pain.
 Your brain weighs about 3 pounds.
=The average adult human brain weighs about 3 pounds (1300 to 1400 grams). A
newborn human baby's brain weighs approximately 350 to 400 grams or three-quarters of
a pound. The average brain is around 15 centimeters long. Men tend to have bigger brains
than women.
 Your skin weigh twice as much as your skin
=Our skin is our heaviest and largest organ, making up about one seventh of our body
weight: Depending on your height and body mass.
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2. The Developing Brain
 The first sense to develop in the womb is the is the sense of touch.
=Touch is the first of our senses to develop, providing us with the sensory scaffold on
which we come to perceive our own bodies and our sense of self. Touch also provides us
with direct access to the external world of physical objects, via haptic exploration.
 Your brain at birth are almost the same size as an adult brain.
=At birth, the average baby's brain is about a quarter of the size of the average adult
brain. Incredibly, it doubles in size in the first year. It keeps growing to about 80% of
adult size by age 3 and 90% – nearly full grown – by age 5.
 A newborn baby’s brain grows about three times its size in the first year.
= During the first year of a child's life, his brain will double in size. Much of this growth
occurs in a part of the brain called the cerebellum, which is in charge of physical
development and motor skills. This development helps babies learn to control their
bodies and movement. It doubles in size in the first year, and by age three it has reached
80 percent of its adult volume. Even more importantly, synapses are formed at a faster
rate during these years than at any other time.
3. Brain Function
 While awake, your brain produces 10 to 23 watts of power enough to power a light bulb.
= While awake, our brain generates between 10 and 23 watts of power–or enough energy
to power a light bulb. Humans experience about 70,000 thoughts
each day. Children who learn two languages before the age of five alter their brain
structure to have much denser gray matter as adults.
 If your brain loses blood for 8 to 10 seconds, you will lose conciousness.
= Severe oxygen deprivation can cause life-threatening problems including coma and
seizures. After 10 minutes without oxygen , brain death occurs. Brain death means there
is no brain activity. A person needs life support measures like a mechanical ventilator to
help them breathe and stay alive. An interruption of blood flow to the brain for more than
10 seconds causes unconsciousness, and an interruption in flow for more than a few
minutes generally results in irreversible brain damage on which permanent brain damage
 begins after only 4 minutes without oxygen, and death can occur as soon as 4 to 6
minutes later.
 Your brain uses 20 percent of the total oxygen in your body.
=Your brain is nourished by one of your body's richest networks of blood vessels. With
each heartbeat, arteries carry about 20 to 25 percent of your blood to your brain, where
billions of cells use about 20 percent of the oxygen and fuel your blood carries. Due to its
high rate of metabolism, the brain needs to consume 20% of the body's total oxygen
supply even though it only makes up for 2% of the body weight and receives only 15% of
the cardiac output.
 The saying “humans only use 10% of their brain” is not true. Every part of the brain has a
known function.
=How much of your brain you are using at any given time varies depending on what you
are doing or thinking, but is not true that humans only use a small part of the brain's
power.
The human brain is complex and researchers are still exploring and learning new
information about how it works. This may be why questions and misconceptions about
how the brain works persist.
The popular belief that we only use 10% of our brain leads people to speculate that we
could tap into a deep well of potential if only we could use our brain's full capacity. But
the only time certain regions of the brain are unused is when brain damage or disease has
destroyed those areas.
 The brain can live for 4 to six minutes without oxygen, and then it begins to die.
=Brain cells are very sensitive to a lack of oxygen. Some brain cells start dying less than
5 minutes after their oxygen supply disappears. As a result, brain hypoxia can rapidly
cause severe brain damage or death. Brain death means there is no brain activity.
 No oxygen for 5 to 10 minutes will result in permanent brain damage.
= A person needs life support measures like a mechanical ventilator to help them breathe
and stay alive. When the brain goes longer than five minutes with low oxygen it can
cause: Coma (a deep state of unconsciousness) Seizures (uncontrolled unwanted
movements, sensations, or behaviors) Brain death (when there is no measurable activity
in the brain)
4. Pschology of Your Brain
 The connection between body and mind is strong. Between 50-70 percent of visits to the
doctor are psychological in nature.
=Physical health and emotional health are intimately intertwined in what's known as the
mind-body connection. Our chemistry and biology impact our mood and emotions, as
well as thoughts and beliefs. With all of these factors combined, they play a major role in
influencing our stress and physical health. The brain is similarly a creation of the mind: it
is the mind's own symbolic expression of mind's existence. The mind-body problem in
philosophy is an investigation into how the human mind and human body are related to
each other. There are two general strategies for explaining their relation. First, mind-body
dualism is the view that human beings are composed of both a conscious spirit-mind and
a non-conscious physical body.
 You can’t tickle yourself because your brain can tell between unexpected external touch
and your own touch.
 =The reason you can't tickle yourself is that when you move a part of your own body, a
part of your brain monitors the movement and anticipates the sensations that it will cause.
Whether it's under the arms, a grab at your knee or your sides, everyone is susceptible to
being tickled. But, scientists have found some people possess the unnerving ability to
tickle themselves. Furthermore that ability, they say, could be an indication a person is at
greater risk of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder in which people
interpret reality abnormally. Schizophrenia may result in some combination of
hallucinations, asdelusions, and extremely disordered thinking and behavior that
impairs daily functioning, and can be disabling.
5. Memory-
 Every time you remember a memory or have a new idea, you are creating a new
connection in your brain.
=Information is channelled to the hippocampus, the brain region crucial for the formation
of new memories and one of the only places in the brain where brand new neurons are
regularly generated. The hippocampus links all of the relevant information together and
encodes it into a new memory by forming new synapses.Memories seem to become more
stable in the brain during the deep stages of sleep. After that, REM—the most active
stage of sleep—seems to play a role in linking together related memories, sometimes in
unexpected ways. That's why a full night of sleep may help with problem-solving.
What does sleep do to your memory?

=Research suggests that sleep helps learning and memory in two distinct ways. First, a
sleep-deprived person cannot focus attention optimally and therefore cannot learn
efficiently. Second, sleep itself has a role in the consolidation of memory, which is
essential for learning new information.
 Sleeping at night may be the best time for your brain to record all your memories of the
day.
= Thanks to many studies done since then, we now know that sleep is crucial for forming
long-term memories of what we have encountered during the day. The sleeping brain
replays the day's experiences and stabilizes them by moving them from the hippocampus,
where they are first formed, to regions across the brain. Sleep is important to a number of
brain functions, including how nerve cells (neurons) communicate with each other. In
fact, your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep. Recent findings suggest
that sleep plays a housekeeping role that removes toxins in your brain that build up while
you are awake.
What is the best amount of time to sleep for memory?
You need a minimum of three hours and the best times to sleep are between 2AM and
6AM. Your body heat is lowest from 3-4AM, so you are drowsiest then and your
memory retention is extremely poor. Sleep helps the mind absorb and retain the
information you reviewed while studying.
 Memories triggered by scent have a stronger connection, so it may be the best way to
remember a memory.
= Scents bypass the thalamus and go straight to the brain's smell center, known as the
olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb is directly connected to the amygdala and
hippocampus, which might explain why the smell of something can so immediately
 trigger a detailed memory or even intense emotion. Scientists believe that smell and
memory are so closely linked because the anatomy of the brain allows olfactory signals
get to the limbic system very quickly. Experts say the memories associated with smells
tend to be older and thought about less often, meaning the recollection is very vivid when
it happens.
One of the most important findings of this study is that the aroma boosted memory
performance even though it was present for the whole night, meaning that there was no
need to present the smell specifically during slow wave sleep.
 Lack of sleep may actually hurt your ability to create new memories.
= Sleep deprivation increases rates of forgetting in episodic memory. Yet, whether an
extended lack of sleep alters the qualitative nature of forgetting is unknown. We
compared forgetting of episodic memories across intervals of overnight sleep, daytime
wakefulness, and overnight sleep deprivation. Since the brain does not have sufficient
time to create new pathways for the information recently learned, sleep deprivation
often affects how memories are consolidated. Sleep deficiency is linked to many chronic
health problems, including heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes,
stroke, obesity, and depression. Sleep deficiency is also linked to a higher chance of
injury in adults, teens, and children.
6. Dreams and Sleep
 About 12% of people dream in black and white while others dream in color. Most people
dream about 1-2 hours a night and have an average of 4-7 dreams each night.
= Roughly 12% of people dream entirely in black and white, making their nightly visions
much like watching an old movie. That comparison isn't a coincidence, either.
 Research sho that brain waves are more active while dreaming than when awake.
= When you dream, your whole brain is active at some level. However, during REM
sleep, your prefrontal cortex is less active. This is the part of the brain that is responsible
for planning and logic. During REM sleep, electrical activity in the brain oscillates at a
frequency between 4 and 7 hertz, generating a type of brainwave known as theta
waves. Blagrove's team found that the intensity of a person's theta waves was positively
correlated with the number of diary items that appeared in their dreams.
Why do dreams keep me awake?
Part of the reason we're likely to wake up during a dream is due to the nature of REM
sleep, the sleep stage in which most dreams occur. In REM sleep, our brain activity is
near waking levels, but our body remains "asleep" or paralyzed so we don't act out our
dreams while lying in bed
 While you sleep,your body produces a hormone that may prevent you from acting out
your dreams, leaving you virtually paralyzed.
= Why does sleep paralysis happen? During the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stage,
you're likely to have dreams. The brain prevents muscles in your limbs from moving to
protect yourself from acting dreams out and hurting yourself. Sleep paralysis happens
when you regain awareness going into or coming out of REM.
What happens if you have sleep paralysis in a dream?
In a dream, the sensation of paralysis may seem to last much longer. If you do experience
it, don't panic. Not being able to move around while in a dream can be scary. Luckily, the
sensation of paralysis will wear off