Cool Brain Gear

Fun Brain Facts

The human brain is spongy to the touch, weighs about three pounds, and looks kind of like a head of cauliflower. Want to learn more? Here are some fun facts about your brain!

Did you know that…

...the weight of an average human brain is about 3 pounds (almost 1 bag of sugar) or 1300-1400g. It is smaller than an elephant's brain (6,000g) but bigger than a monkey's brain (95g)! A dog's brain weighs about 72g and a cat's brain weighs abut 30g. Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain!

…although the brain accounts for only 2% of your body mass, it uses 20% of all the oxygen you breathe.

... approximately 20% of the blood flowing from the heart is pumped to the brain, which means about 750ml of blood pumps through your brain every minute!

...the human brain is approximately 75% water. ...if you could harness the power used by your brain, you could power a 10-watt light bulb.

...the number of internal thought pathways that your brain is capable of producing is: the number one followed by 10.5 million kilometers of standard typewritten zeros!

...during the first month of life, the number of connections or synapses, dramatically increases from 50 trillion to 1 quadrillion. If an infant's body grew at a comparable rate, his weight would increase from 8.5 pounds at birth to 170 pounds at one month old!

...the human brain has about 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) neurons. A stack of 100 billion pieces of paper would be about 5,000 miles high, the distance from San Francisco to London. Another way to think about it: 100 billion is about 166 times the number of people on the planet!  It would take you approximately 3,171 years to count them all!

...children as young as four days old can distinguish the vowel sounds of the language in their natural environment from those of a foreign language.

...it's no accident that telephone numbers in the United States are seven digits long. Our working memory, a very short-term form of memory which stores ideas just long enough for us to understand them, can hold on average a maximum of seven digits. This allows you to look up a phone number and remember it just long enough to dial.

Keep your brain safe!

Your brain is protected inside your skull but could still be damaged if your head is hit or bumps into something hard.

Always wear a helmet if you are riding a bike, scooter or skate board. Always wear a helmet for sports where you could be hit or fall (for example in baseball or horseback-riding). Never dive into water unless you know how deep it is.

 

What do the different parts of your brain do?
	Frontal lobe: Moving, solving problems, remembering, paying attention, talking Temporal lobe: Remembering, understanding speech Parietal lobe: Reading maps, touching Occipital lobe: Seeing
b + rain = brain