Ten Interesting Brain Facts Infographic

Ten Interesting Brain Facts Infographic

Our brain is the most complex organ in our body. The brain and its ability to make sense of things influence everything that we do in our day-to-day lives. All of us are well aware that we do need the brain to function normally, to think and to process information. But there is just so much about this one organ that many of us are un-aware of. For instance, brain holds a lot of memories --- some of which we may be even un-aware of at times. The brain also determines a person’s character and the way he/she conducts himself, which is primarily responsible for what we call as human consciousness. Human consciousness gives a person his/her sense of ethics and emotions. To put it simply, our brain decides how we respond or react to things, how we perceive and process information, how we feel about things, how we recover from a bad day, how we settle things, how we manage things, and so on.

Thank god for science, we now know so many things about the human brain today than ever. Some of the things that were perceived as “facts” years before have proved to be “myths”, and lot of questions and puzzles in the past have answers and backing data today.

Here is list of few brain facts, you probably may not know yet and that have been backed up scientifically :

1. The brain weights about 3 lbs. but uses 20 percent of the body’s blood supply. The total length of the capillaries supplying blood to a human brain is 400 miles!
2. Just like electrical wires, neurons too have a coating of insulation around them to enable fast communication. Thanks to this myelin insulation, neuronal responses can be as fast as 268 MPH, which is approximately 3 times faster than the fastest freeway in the United States!
3. You have your own CEO in your brain. Whenever you find yourself taking the shorter route to go somewhere, comparing prices across stores or simply making a to-do-list, your prefrontal cortex is working making logical and planned decisions.
4. Individuals with synesthesia experience more than one sensation in response to a single sensory stimulation. They may see numbers as having different colors or taste images.
5. The number of olfactory receptor cells indicates how sensitive an animal’s sense of smell is. Humans have 12 million olfactory receptor cells, but that is nothing compared to a dog’s 1 billion!
6. The amygdala registers the emotional facial expressions of others and produces a reaction before we even know we have seen them.
7. “Have we met before?” isn’t always a pick-up line. If the face-recognition area in the temporal lobe of the brain is damaged, people can develop a disorder known as prosopagnosia where they cannot identify people they know. Interestingly, there is a single neuron in that area that selectively responds to pictures of Jennifer Aniston, dubbing it the “Jennifer Aniston neuron.”
8. Individuals with phantom limb pain can experience relief if the remaining arm is shown as a mirror image and moved to appear as if the missing limb is intact. This illusion has been found to relieve this pain.
9. In anarchic hand syndrome, a person has one hand that is no longer under conscious control and appears to move on its own. Hollywood has experimented with this idea in Dr. Strangelove and Idle Hands.
10. One in 125 million people are born without the ability to feel pain. The condition caused by a genetic disorder, congenital analgesia, results in a lack of pain-sensitive nerve endings in the body.