Interesting Facts and Quotes
From Studies About the Brain

You are no doubt aware of the three requirements for human life; food, drink, and fresh air. You can live for 30 days or so without food, and you can go for a week or so without drinking water. Your brain, however, is so active that it cannot go without oxygen for more than 5 minutes without risking serious and permanent damage. Toxic electrons over-accumulate because the blood can’t deliver enough oxygen sponges.

Your brain’s appetite for energy is enormous. Your brain represents only about 2 percent of your body’s total energy usage—about 10 times more than would be expected. When your brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than fully exercising quadriceps. Experts state that the human brain cannot simultaneously activate more than 2 percent of it neurons at any one time. More than this and the glucose supply becomes so quickly exhausted that you will faint.

The following are some brain facts that may interest you:

• Neurons and synapses are so efficient that the brain uses only twelve watts of power.
• Over the course of a day, your brain uses the amount of energy contained in two large bananas.
• The brain is only 3 percent of the body’s weight, but it consumes one-sixth (17 percent) of the body’s total energy.
• The brain has to devote to vision a lot of thinking resources. It takes up about half of everything you do.
• Most people’s speech is control by the left side of the brain, which is also responsible for mathematics and other forms of logical problems solving.
• A child’s brain comes preprogrammed to grow, but it takes a bit more than the first two decades of life to finish this task, making it the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature.
• The brain commits many lies of omission, as it discards most of the information in the world as soon as it is deemed to be unremarkable.

If you are worried about your memory as you age, scientific evidence shows whenever you push yourself to solve problems in a new way, you may be strengthening the connections between your brain cells. The reason: each brain cell has dendrites. These minute extensions—similar to branches of a tree—pass information along from brain cell to brain cell. Without use, your dendrites can atrophy or shrink; but when you exercise them in new and creative ways, their connections remain active, passing new information along. Basically, any conscious effort to exercise your brain can potentially create new brain cell connections. And, remarkably, new dendrites can still be created even if old ones have already died.

Brain Studies Topic List

On the left side of this page you will see a list of Brain Fact Topics. Dr Briggs is frequently updating this enlightening list of intriguing quotes and short thoughts about the human brain, so keep checking back to keep up with the latest in brain research!