Doh!
I just read an article entitled 25 Things You Didn’t Know About the Human Brain. As a lay-person who works in the medical field, I love these stories that attempt to turn the true mysteries of science and medicine into pop culture style information digestible by the masses. While some of the facts in the brain article were more to the structural (the brain has 100,000 miles of blood vessels in it), others were more intriguing and got my imagination wandering.
My favorite factoid in the article was this: your brain generates between 10 and 23 watts of power at rest, enough to power a light bulb. I wonder if this is what led to the convention of showing a light bulb above the head to connote the formation of an idea. Perhaps this is a revelation that might lead to a solution to our nation’s demand for clean energy (excepting those with dirty minds, I suppose). Is there any way to harness the wattage of sleeping people to power their iPads and iPhones for tomorrow’s business day? Just think: no more slumming at Starbucks to use the free outlets; just swing by the Apple Store and pick up the special headphones that send energy in both directions. Steve Jobs would be all over this if he were here, I know it.
Next favorite brain fact: The brain is comprised of at least 60% fat. What a relief! By comparison the rest of me is downright svelte. My brain may look like Newt Gingrich at a Packers game but it makes the rest of me look like Uma Thurman after a few weeks on the Zone Diet. If it is considered healthy to run around with a brain fat content of 60% in your head, would you be doing it an injustice by living a lowfat lifestyle with the rest of your body? I doubt it, but one can dream.
Mario Andretti---driving the pace car
Next favorite: information can be processed through the brain at up to 268 miles per hour. I am wondering how they measure this. I envision a miniature pace car traveling alongside the intellectual inputs that penetrate your cortex while perusing the New York Times–kind of like Fantastic Voyage with Mario Andretti in the driver’s seat. What causes variability in brain processing speed, I wonder? Is it like a computer where too much multi-tasking can cause the system to slow down and crash, replacing your pupils with those little spinning rainbow wheels of death? Are some brains like Porsches, built for speed, while others are out there getting great gas mileage but puttering along Prius-like? Does brain processing speed slow down in direct correlation to age, just like driving speed does?
I also learned from the brain article that the average person thinks 70,000 thoughts per day. There was no footnote to clarify whether those were 70,000 unique thoughts or if 62,000 of them, as in my case, are related to chocolate and its imminent acquisition while the rest are related to George Clooney and remembering where I left my car keys. In any event that is a lot of thinking–nearly 3000 thoughts per hour, more than 48 thoughts per minute. No wonder we become so overwhelmed, particularly in a world where our own native thoughts are augmented by so many electronic inputs that Mario Andretti must be breaking out in a sweat in anticipation of the drive ahead.
Thought number 68,754: there are my keys!
As a huge fan of comedy, I especially enjoyed learning from the brain article that a laugh requires 5 different parts of your brain to execute. That sounds almost like exercise, so it has to be good for you. At a minimum, according to Dr. Eric Chudler, the brain needs to perceive the emotions produced by a funny situation, engage in the “getting it” part of a joke (cognitive, thinking part of humor), and respond by moving the muscles of the face to smile (motor part of humor). This makes laughter one of the more complex brain activities and one of the best examples of the mind-body connection. In addition to engaging perception, cognition and movement functions, laughter causes increased blood pressure and heart rate, changes breathing patterns, reduces a variety of neurochemicals (eg, stress-related cortisol), and boosts the immune system, all of which require the brain’s cooperation.
The study of the brain is called neurology, but I bet you didn’t know that the physiological study of laughter is called gelotology. Among the combined neurology/gelology studies undertaken in academia has been that of why you cannot effectively tickle yourself. Apparently the brain can distinguish between unexpected external touch and your own, and is conditioned to ignore sensations generated by one’s own movements. Too bad, really, as laughter is good therapy when you’re feeling down and one doesn’t always have access to YouTube.
Wouldn’t it be great if, during one of those particularly vexing Board meetings, one could tickle one’s own belly and get out a good laugh to relieve the stress of finding out that management missed last month’s numbers? The good news is that my blog readers do have access to YouTube, so if you’re reading this post this on your iPad while pretending you are looking at the Board book, you can give your brain some 268 mile per hour exercise by just trying not to laugh through this 1 minute video. Brain, start your engines!
PS–gratuitous moronic brain joke: What do you call a skull that is missing 100 million neurons? A no-brainer.
PPS–best brain movie moment of all time from Young Frankenstein
