FYI: 20 Things about the BRAIN

1. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the human brain make it equivalent to a computer able to process 1,000 trillion bits per second. Deep Blue who?
2. But computers may catch up. Moore’s law predicts that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months; at that rate, computers will outpace the human brain after 2020.
3. Righties, rejoice: The brain’s left hemisphere, which controls the body’s right side, has 186 million more neurons than does the right hemisphere.
4. But don’t feel left out, lefties: a 2006 study revealed that southpaws coordinate their hemispheres more effectively, possibly due to better performance of the corpus callosum, a nerve bundle that connects the two halves.
5. Kim Peek, one of the savants who inspired the movie Rain Man, lack a corpus callosum. He has memorized thousands of books.
6. Damage to the corpus callosum can lead to odd consequences. An example is alien hand syndrome, in which a hand performs actions without the owner’s intent.
7. Thinking about all this may give you a headache, but it’s not a brainache. The brain processes the signals of pain but is not sensitive itself. headaches are often due to tight shoulder or jaw muscles.
8. A 2006 study found a gene mutation that prevents distress signals from reaching the brain. Researchers became interested in the topic when they heard about a boy who ran over burning coals without feeling them.
9. Ancient Egyptians considered the heart the center of intelligence & left it in the body during mummification. The brain was pulled out through the nostrils & discarded.
10. Aristotle saw the brain as the body’s air-conditioning. “The brain, then, tempers the heat & seething of the heart,” he wrote.
11. Around 400 B.C., a pre-Incan society in Peru practiced brain surgeries in the form of trepanation, the drilling of holes in the skull.
12. Initially only 1/3 of those patients survived, as indicated by short or long term healing of the skull. By A.D. 1400, survival rates had topped 80%.
13. Those ancient people were lucky to reach the age of 50. Today it takes 15 years of training just to start practicing brain surgery.
14. Neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine for inventing the labotomy. In 2005 families of lobotomy patients called for his prize to be revoked.
15. Your brain can grow on the job. Learning to juggle alters the structure of motion-detection areas in the brain in just a week.
16. In 1786 Luigi Galvani noticed that a skinned frog’s legs jumped when he touched its nerves with scissors during a thunderstorm.
17. Galvani later announced that electrical impulses from the brain make muscles contract. his experiments inspired a famous work of Enlish literature: Frankenstein.
18. Your brain on drugs? The brain has receptors for a naturally occurring molecule called anandamide, which acts like marijuana, reducing pain & impairing memory.
19. Intense personal memories that we never forget - like our first kiss or a painful breakup - are managed by the amygdala, best known as the brain’s fear center.
20. Rarely, children with severe seizures undergo hemispherectomy, the removal of up to half the brain. Their cognitive abilities, typically impaired by the seizures, sometimes improve.
(Taken from Discover Magazine: The Brain, Winter 2009)