Our Wonderful Brain

From time to time I wonder that our brain is probably the most complex and the least understood organ of ours. We know a lot (really A LOT) about it, and still we cannot grasp the essence of how it works. We are just scratching the surface...

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Here are a few facts that we already know:

• You build your body up by exercising but you also need to build your brain by performing mental activities. So solve puzzles, play board games and do other stimulating mental activities to help prevent dementia and reduce memory loss. (And have fun, too! )
• Enough sleep is as necessary as air, water and food for healthy brain function.
• The brain grows to its full size by the time a person is 4 years old.
• The consistency of our brain is close to warm butter.
• The brain and a computer are very similar. Both adapt and learn, but the brain is much faster and better at learning new things. A computer on the other hand, can perform many complex tasks simultaneously. The brain is not as good at multitasking. It is very difficult for most people to recite a poem and perform a division problem in their head at the same time. But the autonomic nervous system of the brain does control breathing, heart rate and blood pressure at the same time it performs various mental tasks.
• Your brain is constantly monitoring and fine-tuning what is going on in your body – 24 hours a day – without you even being aware of it.
• The right and left hemispheres of your brain are connected by 50 million neurons.
• Your brain is 85 % water. So getting dehydrated can have some bad effects on your brain, including a decrease in your ability to concentrate. Be sure to drink 8 glasses of water a day to stay healthy and alert.
• It is commonly thought that you use only 10% of your brain. Not so! You may not use every neuron in your brain at the same time, but each one is important.
• Consciousness emerges from the frontal lobes of your brain.
• Calcium, as we know, is good for bone health, but it is also needed for nerve-impulse conduction throughout the body.
• Raw nuts and seeds supply essential fatty acids your brain needs to function. Walnuts especially are loaded with these healthy oils. Other foods that contain them include pumpkin seeds and flax seeds.

But it's even more exciting to list the things we don't know yet...

• We don’t know how many neurons are in the human brain.
• We don’t know why neurons are shaped the way they are.
• We don’t know the function of enkephalins (endogenous opioids) in normal brain activity, although their discovery did somewhat explain why our brains have receptors for opiates at all.
• We don’t know why each hemisphere of our brains controls the opposite side of our bodies.
• We don’t know exactly what is involved in face recognition, even though six discrete brain areas have been implicated in it.
• We don’t know how the images that our retinas detect are recreated in the cortex.
• We don’t know which brain regions could hold some attributes of mind, like understanding and creativity.
• We don’t know why we sleep, or how we fall asleep, or why we dream. Or if animals dream.
• And obviously we don’t know what consciousness is.

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