10 Brain Facts

10 Brain Facts handpicked by the Knowing Neurons team The brain weighs about 3 lbs but uses 20% of the body's 1. blood supply. The total length of the capillaries supplying blood to a human brain is 400 miles! 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! 2. Prefrontal cortex 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 to making logical, planned decisions. 3. 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. 4. The number of olfactory receptor cells indicates how sensitive an animal's sense of 5. smell is. Humans have 12 million olfactory receptor cells, but that is nothing compared to a dog's 1 billion! The amygdala registers the emotional facial 6. expressions of others and produces a reaction before we even know we have seen them. "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 prospagnosia 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." 7. Temporal lobe 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. 8. 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. 9. One in 125 million people are born without the 10 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. © 2014 http://knowingneurons.com