Facts about the brain.

Facts about Human Brain

Human brain is the most mysterious thing ever known. Various experiments and tests are being performed to understand it well from a long time. God is the biggest engineer. His creations are far beyond our understandings and imaginations. One of those creations is Brain. Let’s have a look at some interesting facts about Human Brain. Feel free to share your views with us via comments below.

Some Stats about Human Brain:

• Weight of Human Brain is 3 pounds.
• If brain doesn’t get air for 4-6 minutes, it will start to die.
• Number of neurons in Brain is 100 million.
• Number of synapses for each neuron in Human brain is 1,000-10,000.
• Brain constitutes 80 % water.

Some Interesting Facts about Human Brain:

Storage capacity of Human Brain is between 3 and 1,000 Terabytes.

Yes, Scientists believe that a normal functioning brain can store 5 times information than Encyclopedia Britannica which is of 70 TB in size.

Human Brain uses 20% of the Oxygen that enters the Bloodstream.

Brain is such a small portion of body that it makes only 2% of body mass; still it uses 20% of oxygen.

Brain is more active at night than day.

This is strange. Even scientists don’t know the exact reason yet. But this is true. This is the reason why solutions of some difficult problems that you couldn’t solve strike you during sleep.

• Number of neurons in brain keeps growing throughout life.
• People with great I.Q have more dreams during night.
• Brain doesn’t have pain receptors. It doesn’t feel pain.

You must have wondered, why you laugh when someone tickles you but you don’t laugh when you tickle yourself. This is due to your smart brain; it knows that you are tickling. So, it doesn’t react.

Have proper lunch for a better IQ.

Various studies in New York concluded that those who have proper and healthy lunch perform 14% better in IQ tests.

You are virtually paralyzed during sleep.

Brain creates a hormone when you sleep that prevents your body to act your dream.

Curious about sleep?

Thirty-six percent of our lives are spent asleep, which means, if you live to 90, you’ll have slept for 32 years. But we don’t appreciate sleep enough. To make the point here are some quotes:

Thomas Edison — “Sleep is a criminal waste of time, inherited from our cave days” — and Margaret Thatcher — “Sleep is for wimps.” Simply put not only do we not appreciate sleep, but we treat it like an illness and an enemy.

Of course this simply shouldn’t be the case. In fact, some areas of the brain are more active during the sleep stage than while the body is awake. But the essential question that we lose sleep over: Why do we sleep? There is no real consensus, but here are three popular answers:

1. Sleep is for restoration, to replenish and repair metabolic processes. Indeed, a whole host of genes are “turned on” only during sleep — genes associated with restoration and metabolic pathways.

2. Sleep is for energy conservation, to save calories. This may seem an intuitive answer except that the difference between sleeping and quietly resting is about 110 calories a night, the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Not a very good upshot for such a complex process.

3. Finally, sleep is for brain processing and memory consolidation. Studies show that if you prevent people from sleeping after a learning task, their ability to learn is basically smashed. And worse, our abilities to come up with novel solutions after a complex task are reduced after sleep deprivation.

The danger of sleep deprivation can’t be stressed enough. For one thing, sleep-deprived people fall asleep involuntarily, taking “microsleeps” they can’t control. Thirty-one percent of drivers will fall asleep while driving at least once in their lifetime. That is: 100,000 accidents a year happen because of tiredness.

For those who want to take control of their sleep habits here are some tips:

1. Decrease your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed.

2. Make your room a bedroom a haven for sleep by making it dark and cool.

3. Turn off your mobile phones, computers and anything that will excite the brain.

4. Don’t drink caffeine after lunch.

5. Increase light exposure when you wake up.

Let's also bust some myths:

1. Teenagers are lazy? Nope. Their biological clocks make them sleep and wake later.

2. You need 8 hours of sleep a day? Nope. That’s just an average.

3. Older people need less sleep? Nope. Sleep demands of the age don’t slow down.

4. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Nope. Just wrong, on many levels. It just makes you more smug.

According to  research, genes that have been shown to be important in the generation of sleep, when muted, predispose individuals to mental-health problems. It's suggested that sleep levels could be used as an early warning signals for illnesses like schizophrenia. Research has found that schizophrenia patients stay awake during the night phase, asleep during day, suggesting that sleep and mental illness aren’t simply associated, they are physically linked. Which opens the door for sleep to be used as a new therapeutic target.