30 amazing facts about your brain that will blow your mind

These two nutrients are incredibly vital to the functioning and survival of the human brain. It takes the brain anywhere from three to five minutes to suffer irreversible damage when it is starved of oxygen or glucose. As Dr. Omalu explains, the brain controls and drives the heart and lungs and controls our consciousness. This is why most deaths are never instant. “Even if a human being is decapitated, the brain does not suffer irreversible damage and death until several minutes after decapitation.”

Nope – those nerve cells in your noggin continue to change based on how often they’re used and stimulated in the first year of life. This is especially true for speech and language. “Some toddlers have to undergo extensive brain resections for medical reasons and these procedures may unfortunately mean removing the primary language centre in the brain,” explains Jennifer Bickel, MD, Paediatric Neurologist and Director of Comprehensive Headache Clinic at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “If adults undergo a similar procedure, they are often unable to communicate through written or verbal language, however, a young child’s brain is so adaptable that it will reorganise itself and the ability to use language will be retained.” It’s this ongoing ability of the brain to adapt that is the reason why young children require regular exposure to language.

“Although the headsets of science fiction are still far off, technology – like the printing press – has been amplifying human abilities and helping us learn, process and communicate for centuries now,” explains Dr. Wingeier. But why does this count as a brain-machine interface? When you learned to read, your brain had to change and restructure itself so your visual and language systems could transfer information from the page into your working memory. “Now, we’re augmenting our brains further with smartphones and Google searches,” he says. “And, just like the science-fiction headsets, it’s up to us to use them wisely.”

As it’s working, your brain is creating electric fields. “The fields are measured on your scalp, called the electroencephalogram (EEG), and are often larger when your brain is doing less,” explains Dr. Wingeier. “This is because idle neurons sync up by default – so like a crowd chanting in unison, they can be ‘heard’ from far away.” Neurons processing more information sync up in more complex patterns, so like a crowd having a thousand different conversations, they’re harder to “hear” clearly.

There’s plenty scientists are still discovering about the long-lost reptiles that roamed the earth 65 million years ago. But what they do know is that they couldn’t think or reason the way humans can. “Dinosaurs had no neocortex, which we use for thinking and such, and no frontal lobes, which we use for planning and problem-solving and the like,” says Dr. Soper. “Dinosaur thinking is more along the line of chicken thinking – they could learn certain things, but minimally compared to mammals.” They did, however, have a killer sense of smell that was far, far better than we humans have.

“As many civilisations have said, the older folk know more because of their experience, even though their memory may not be as good,” says Dr. Soper. “With regard to ageing, the mind that stays active and exercises will not show the decline that others may show.” Of course, this involves exercising the brain daily, which is why crossword puzzles and games like Sudoku, bingo and mahjong can be incredibly helpful for the elderly. “If the elderly pick up mental exercises, their intelligence may actually go up – and the same is true of the body and its exercises.”

There’s no such thing as knowing too much – or learning so much that you can’t retain any more information (though it can certainly feel that way after sitting through a long board meeting). “Your brain doesn’t get ‘used up’ like the data storage in your computer or smartphone,” says Krieff. “There is endless brain power! Although lack of sleep can affect your brain’s ability to create more memories.”

The brain is similar to a muscle, explains Shirley Newell, MD, chief medical officer at Aegis Living. “You can build up your ‘cognitive reserve,’ or your brain’s innate ability to get a job done, through different types of learning and/or through new experiences.” People with a stronger and healthier cognitive reserve – one that’s been strengthened with learned experience – have been shown to be more capable of coping with unexpected life events.

Ever wonder how you can say something, get distracted briefly, and then completely forget what you were about to say? This has to do with your brain’s capacity for holding small amounts of information in the active mind. It keeps it in an available state for easy access, but only does so for a period of around a half a minute. Brock notes that, when recalling numbers, specifically, most people hold memory for around 7.3 seconds on the average and 9.3 seconds on average for letters.

These brain facts might sound crazy, but a hemispherectomy, or the surgical removal of half of the brain, can and does happen – with little or no effect on personality or memory. It’s a very rare neurosurgical procedure that is used to treat a variety of seizure disorders. However, this type of procedure, as one would imagine, is not done without impact. “Some traits are very specific to one hemisphere thus it can give us very subtle differences,” says Brock. “Usually memory, humour and personality will recover but cognition might change a little.”