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Being perhaps the most important organ in the human body, the brain, is capable of sending and receiving massive amounts of data, controlling thought, memory, emotion, touch, and every process that regulates our body. Scientists and doctors have been trying to understand the brain’s power and how we can use it to live a better life. 

Chemical and electrical impulses are sent and received by the brain to & from  the entire body. Different signals govern various processes, which your brain decodes. Some cause you to feel fatigued, while others cause you to feel discomfort, calm or pleasure. Some messages are preserved in the brain, while others are sent to distant extremities via the spinal cord and the body’s enormous network of nerves. The central nervous system relies on billions of neurons (nerve cells in the brain) to accomplish this.

The brain has multiple functions and tasks in our body. Here are 5 facts scientists discovered  about the brain that you may not know:

1. You Can Survive With Only Half of Your Brain. 

Research shows that we are able to function with only half a brain – or even less. The first human hemispherectomy took place, unintentionally, in 1923 at Johns Hopkins Hospital, when surgeon Walter Edward Dandy attempted to remove a tumor and accidentally removed half of his patient’s brain in the process. Apart from losing full use of the hand opposite the amputated hemisphere, the patient healed and life returned to normal, much to his doctor’s surprise. Dandy was so inspired by this remarkable achievement that he tried five more hemispherectomies on brain cancer patients. K.G. McKenzie, a Canadian neurosurgeon, soon discovered that hemispherectomy might also cure epilepsy. It was enough to make the once-rare procedure a common treatment, but no one seemed to understand why it worked or how life could continue normally thereafter. 

The brain, it turns out, is extremely malleable.  This property is known as plasticity. With the exception of minor muscle weakness, most patients can carry on much as they did before. 

2. Your Brain Predicts Almost Everything You Do.

Your brain draws from your past experiences and predicts your future. Your brain constructs your reality of what you see, hear and feel from your previous experiences. Any emotions including pain, happiness, fear are constructed by your brain. The predicting game happens when the neurons in your brain take any given situation, review past experiences, then make their best guess about what will happen next. 

3. Your Brain Can Outlive Your Body. 

This is based on research into Robert White’s life and his  brain isolation experiment in the late 1960s. In the experiment, Dr. White extracted a monkey’s living brain, kept it alive by flushing it with blood and fluids, and then connected it to an EEG. The brain, which had no body, was still able to think. The brain was also able to send forth electrical signals, exactly like any other living brain within a living body. This showed that biochemical activities were still going on to keep brain cells alive.

4. Human Brains Have Enough Memory to Store all of the Internet. 

Research shows that brains have a processing speed of roughly 1018 operations per second. Almost a billion computations are performed every second in the human brain. The human brain uses 26 different sorts of codes to make sense of the environment, whereas computers use binary coding (alternating ones and zeros). Human brains can also hold a whopping one petabyte of information. That’s one thousand million million bytes of information. 

5. Your Brain Never Sleeps. 

Your brain is actually working on maintenance while you’re sleeping. The brain cleans up trash, maintains & consolidates knowledge, and ensures that your body stays in place while it’s  getting the rest it needs. In  addition, it is coordinating important body processes like breathing. This makes the brain one busy organ. 

Understanding the human brain is an ongoing process. There is so much we still don’t know about it’s functionalities. Our brain has grown significantly in size and complexity over the last million years of evolution, resulting in the human species’ remarkable cognitive capacities. New discoveries and studies continue to shed more light on the riddles of human evolution. This has  crucial implications for our knowledge of human brain illnesses and wellbeing. It turns out the quest to explore our inner universe is as fantastical and mind blowing as the exploration of the outer realms of our universe. 

Resources 

The Johns Hopkins University (2021), Brain Anatomy and How the Brain Works. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Johns Hopkins Health System. Retrieved from https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/anatomy-of-the-brain

Tompa R. (2019). 5 unsolved mysteries about the brain. Neuroscience at the Allen Science. Retrieved from https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/news-press/articles/5-unsolved-mysteries-about-brain

Northwestern Medicine and Northwestern Memorial HealthCare (2019). 11 Fun Facts About Your Brain. Northwestern Medicine® is a trademark of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, used by Northwestern University. Retrieved from https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/11-fun-facts-about-your-brain

Feldman B. L. (2021). Seven and a half lessons about the brain.