15 Fun Facts About the Brain for Trivia Night
Your brain is a miraculous organ, the center for your every thought, emotion, and action, but also the source of some fascinating trivia. Your brain is capable of both incredible feats of memory and cognitive processing and also of tricking you with optical illusions or making you forget where you left your keys.
We’ve put together a few fascinating facts about the brain, like how fat it is, whether you should multitask, and how yawning affects the brain. See how many facts you can remember about your brain!
1. How Fat Is Your Brain?
Your brain is your fattiest organ, but these fatty acids are essential for brain performance. That doesn’t mean you will get smarter binging on potato chips. Help keep your brain healthy by consuming the right amounts of healthy fats, like that in salmon, eggs, and nuts.
2. How Many Dreams Do People Usually Have in a Night?
Dreams are normal and healthy. Your brain continues working even after you’ve shut your eyes for a restful night. Imagination, psychological factors, and neurological factors continue impacting you after you’ve fallen asleep. On average, you experience 4-7 dreams each night.
3. When Is Your Brain Fully Formed?
Well, not until the age of 25. The brain develops forward, beginning at the back. The frontal lobe, the last to develop, is the area that controls planning and reasoning. Interruptions to growth and development can have a negative impact on brain development and behavioral regulation.
4. What Is Brain Freeze?
You’ve likely experienced brain freeze when you quickly eat or drink something cold. Blood vessels in the back of your throat are suddenly chilled, taking that cold blood to your brain. The cold blood causes the vessels to constrict and release as they warm up, creating temporary pain in your forehead.
5. The Brain Weighs How Much?
The average human brain weighs 3 pounds, or about the same as a steam iron or electric kettle. Although men tend to have slightly larger brains, the size does not always correlate to intelligence.
6. Can the Brain Feel Pain?
Bumped your head? Your brain didn’t feel it. The brain itself can’t feel pain, though its exterior membranes and scalp have pain receptors.
7. How Fast Does Alcohol Affect Your Brain?
Alcohol reaches your brain in only five minutes and starts to affect you within 10 minutes. Blurred vision, slurred speech, and unsteady walking are common effects of drinking too much alcohol. Evidence shows that long periods of consumption can permanently impact the brain in negative ways, including memory loss and reduced cognitive functioning
8. Can You Trust the Eyewitness?
Eyewitness accounts are only about 50% accurate. During times of trauma, the brain experiences difficulty remembering the details of situations and people it's not familiar with.
9. What Percent of the Oxygen and Blood in Your Body Does Your Brain Need?
Your brain is demanding and there are only so many resources to go around. The average body holds 1.2-1.5 gallons of blood, while the 3-pound brain requires 20 percent of the oxygen and blood in your body.
10. Do You Multitask?
You are never truly multitasking in the sense of your brain paying attention to two things at once. Instead, you are making rapid shifts between multiple tasks. Every time you switch tasks you’re changing the context of the situation, causing the brain to constantly shift. Research shows that error rates increase up to 50% when multitasking, and it takes two times longer to complete tasks.
11. Why Can Being Forgetful Be Helpful?
Forgetting is part of learning. There are so many experiences stored in the brain that they take up memory space, just like all those photos on your phone. A new theory suggests that forgetting less relevant memories is the brain’s way of interacting with the environment, making better decisions, and improving well-being. Think of it like your computer that writes over deleted files to function more efficiently.
12. Why Does Reading Out Loud Catch Mistakes?
Many students and professionals have submitted reports only to later find their spelling mistakes. Reading the report out loud can often catch errors because the brain uses different circuits than when reading is done silently.
13. How Does Reading Out Loud Help With Learning?
I’ve done it, you’ve probably done it, too. When greeted with a complex, or simply a new, concept, reading it out loud or literally “talking is through” helps the brain process and retain information for later recall.
14. Can Music Boost Your Mood?
Listening to music triggers your brain’s reward system triggering dopamine and oxytocin. It is suggested that the dopamine release may assist in memory because the brain makes an association between the activity and the music. With that in mind, make sure to create a study and work playlist.
15. Why Do We Yawn?
Like your body, your brain needs rest to work at peak performance. Sleep deprivation impairs judgment and actually kills brain cells. Yawning isn’t only a sign of being tired, research suggests that yawning serves to cool the brain, while sleep deprivation increases its temperature. Next time someone asks if you’re tired after catching you in a yawn, just let them know your brain is too warm.
Sources: Northwest Medicine, Healthline, Dent Institute, Penn LPS
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