150 Interesting Psychological Facts about the Human Brain

The human brain is one of the most complex and miraculous organs in the body. It is responsible for all the basic functions of life, such as breathing, eating, walking, talking, and thinking. The brain is made up of billions of cells, and it is constantly growing and changing.

The brain is constantly working. It is responsible for breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and many other.

1. If you want to change something about yourself, repeat your intentions over and over. Eventually your brain will get into a new pattern.
2. The way you dressed is linked to your mood.
3. It has been scientifically proven that: the less you know, the more you think you know.
4. People will be more inclined to like you if you ask them a favor of them. It is called the ‘Ben Franklin Effect’.
5. You can ‘rewire’ your brain to be happy by simply recalling 3 things “you are grateful” for every day for 21 days.
6. We are more creative at night and less in the afternoon.
7. Some people automatically assume that you’re mad at them when you’re quiet. This is due to a guilty conscience.
8. Walking increases brain activity.
9. Hearing your name being called, when no one has actually called your name, is a likely sign of a healthy mind.
10. People who speak two languages, may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages.
11. By thinking one positive thought every morning you can psychologically trick your brain into being a happier person.
12. The typical brain comprises about 2% of the body’s total weight, but uses 20% of its total energy and oxygen intake.
13. Your brain is 73% water.
14. Ninety minutes of sweating can temporarily shrink the brain as much as one year of aging does.
15. Your brain weighs about three pounds.
16. Sixty percent of the dry weight is fat, making the brain the fattiest organ in the body.
17. Twenty-five percent of the body’s cholesterol resides within the brain.
18. Cholesterol is an integral part of every brain cell.
19. Without adequate cholesterol, brain cells die.
20. No one knows for sure, but the latest estimate is that our brains contain roughly 86 billion brain cells.
21. Each neuron can transmit 1,000 nerve impulses per second and make as many as tens of thousands of synaptic contacts with other neurons.
22. A piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses, all communicating with each other.
23. All brain cells are not alike.
24. Eventually, he made a cross-country trip with the brain in a Tupperware container to deliver it to Einstein’s granddaughter.
25. There are as many as 10,000 specific types of neurons in the brain
26. Your brain needs a constant supply of oxygen.
27. As little as five minutes without oxygen can cause some brain cells to die, leading to severe brain damage.
28. Babies have big heads to hold rapidly growing brains.
29. A 2-year-old’s brain is 80% of adult size.
30. As any parent can attest, teenage brains are not fully formed.
31. It isn’t until about the age of 25 that the human brain reaches full maturity.
32. Brain information travels up to an impressive 268 miles per hour.
33. This is faster than Formula 1 race cars which top out at 240 mph.
34. Your brain generates about 12-25 watts of electricity.
35. This is enough to power a low-wattage LED light.
36. There’s a reason the brain has been called a “random thought generator.”
37. The average brain is believed to generate up to 60,000 thoughts per day
38. Every minute, 750-1,000 milliliters of blood flows through the brain.
39. This is enough to fill a bottle of wine or liter bottle of soda.
40. Your brain can process an image that your eyes have seen for as little as 13 milliseconds — less time than it takes for you to blink.
41. Size matters with some things, but with the brain, bigger doesn’t always mean better or smarter.
42. In general, men’s brains are 10% bigger than women’s, even after taking into account larger body size.
43. However, the hippocampus, the part of the brain most strongly linked with memory, is typically larger in women.
44. Albert Einstein’s brain weighed 2.71 pounds (1,230 grams) — 10% smaller than the average of 3 pounds (1,400 grams).
45. However, the neuron density of his brain was greater than average.
46. Neanderthal brains were 10% larger than our Homo sapiens brains.
47. While humans have the largest brains proportional to body weight of all animals, we don’t have the biggest brains.
48. Human brains have gotten significantly smaller over the past 10-20,000 years.
49. The lost volume is equivalent to the size of a tennis ball.
50. The hippocampus, the part of the brain considered the “memory center,” is significantly larger in London cab drivers.
51. Chronic stress and depression are rampant in modern life.
52. The modern diet is low in omega-3 essential fatty acids.
53. Low levels of omega-3s result in brain shrinkage equivalent to two years of structural brain aging.
54. Since the Victorian era, average IQs have gone down 1.6 points per decade for a total of 13.35 points.
55. Technology has forced most of us to be prodigious multitasks. But your brain can’t learn or concentrate on two things at once.
56. Unexpectedly, millennials (aged 18 to 34) are more forgetful than baby boomers.
57. Attention spans are getting shorter.
58. In 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. Now, it’s 8 seconds. That’s shorter than the 9-second attention span of the average goldfish
59. Brain cells cannibalize themselves as a last ditch source of energy to ward off starvation.
60. In very real ways, dieting, especially low-fat diets, can force your brain to eat itself.
61. Over 140 proteins in the brain are negatively impacted by exposure to electromagnetic frequencies, the kind emitted by your cell phone and other electronic devices.
62. When areas of the brain involved in navigation are no longer used, those neural connections fade away via a process known as synaptic pruning.
63. Rapid advancements in neuroscience means that information is outdated fast.
64. This is one reason that there’s a lot of misinformation and myths floating around about the brain.
65. New evidence has shown that these commonly accepted brain “facts” are not true.
66. The popular myth that we use only 10% of our brains is flat-out wrong.
67. Brain scans clearly show that we use most of our brain most of the time, even when we’re sleeping.
68. We are not left-brained or right-brained; we are “whole-brained.”
69. The “Mozart effect” has been debunked.
70. While listening to certain kinds of music can improve memory and concentration, there’s nothing unique about listening to Mozart.
71. You may have heard that we have more brain cells than there are stars in the Milky Way, but this is not true.
72. Best-guess estimates are that we have 86 billion neurons while there are 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way.
73. It’s often said that there are 10,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain when, actually, that number is closer to 400 miles.
74. Contrary to the prevailing medical belief, having high total cholesterol is not bad for your brain.
75. In fact, high cholesterol actually reduces your risk of dementia.
76. Until recently, it was a “fact” that you were born with a set level of intelligence and number of brain cells.
77. But it has since been discovered that your brain has the capacity to change throughout your lifetime due to a property known as brain plasticity.
78. The brain can continue to form new brain cells via a process known as neurogenesis.
79. Facts about the Brain and Memory
80. It was once thought that the brain recorded memories like a camera, but this is not how memory works.
81. Rather than being discrete recordings of experience, memory-making is more akin to the creation of improvisational jazz.
82. Memory is better thought of as an activity rather than being associated with a specific area of the brain.
83. Any given memory is deconstructed and distributed in different parts of the brain.
84. Then, for the memory to be recalled, it gets reconstructed from the individual fragments.
85. In fact, at any given age, you’re likely getting better at some things and worse at others.
86. While you are drunk, your brain is incapable of forming memories.
87. It’s generally believed that people with exceptional memories are born that way, but this is rarely the case.
88. Human brain tissue is not dense.
89. It’s very fragile — soft and squishy similar to the consistency of soft tofu or gelatin.
90. The brain produces a half cup of fluid every day.
91. It floats in this bath of cerebrospinal fluid which acts as a shock absorber to keep the brain from being crushed by its own weight.
92. Sometimes half a brain is good as a whole one.
93. When surgeons operate to stop seizures, they remove or disable half of the brain in a procedure known as a hemispherectomy.
94. Shockingly, patients experience no effect on personality or memory.
95. Your brain has a pattern of connectivity as unique as your fingerprints.
96. Although pain is processed in your brain, your brain has no pain receptors and feels no pain.
97. This explains how brain surgery can be performed while the patient is awake with no pain or discomfort.
98. Headache pain feels like it starts in your brain, but is caused by sensations from nearby skin, joints, sinuses, blood vessels or muscles.
99. Brain freeze sure feels like pain in the brain but is an example of referred pain emanating from the roof of the mouth.
100. Fortunately, brain freeze does not freeze brain cells because frozen brain cells rupture and turn to mush.
101. The brains of introverts and extroverts are measurably different.
102. MRIs reveal that the dopamine reward network is more active in the brains of extroverts while introverts’ brains have more gray matter.
103. According to research done at Cambridge University, the order of letters in a word doesn’t matter much to your brain.
104. As long as the first and last letters are in the right spot, your brain can rearrange the letters to form words as fast as you can read.
105. The human brain is usually compared to the most advanced technology of the day.
106. It’s been compared to a clock, a switchboard, a computer, and, most recently, to the internet.
107. You might be surprised to learn that, in every way it’s been tested, the brain is still far superior to the most powerful computers in existence.
108. Your brain’s storage capacity is considered virtually unlimited.
109. It doesn’t get “used up” like RAM in your computer.
110. The latest research shows that the brain’s memory capacity is a quadrillion, or 1015, bytes.
111. Astoundingly, this is about the same amount needed to store the entire internet! (73)
112. The human brain is capable of 1,016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any existing computer.
113. Researchers involved in the AI Impacts project have developed a way to compare supercomputers to brains — by measuring how fast a computer can move information around within its own system.
114. By this standard, the human brain is 30 times more powerful than the IBM Sequoia, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
115. Japan’s K computer is one of the most powerful computers in the world.
116. When programmed to simulate human brain activity, it took 40 minutes to crunch the data equivalent to just one second of brain activity.
117. Evidence Our Brains “Could Be Better”
118. You’ve seen plenty of evidence so far that our brains are truly amazing!
119. But the brain can also work in ways that are illogical, fallible, and counterproductive.
120. There are almost 200 known cognitive biases and distortions that cause us to think and act irrationally.
121. Memories are shockingly unreliable and change over time.
122. Emotions, motivation, cues, context and frequency of use can all affect how accurately you remember something.
123. This includes “flashbulb memories” which occur during traumatic events.
124. Of the thousands of thoughts a person has every day, it’s estimated that 70% of this mental chatter is negative — self-critical, pessimistic, and fearful.
125. Think you’re in control of your life? Don’t be so sure.
126. Ninety-five percent of your decisions take place in your subconscious mind.
127. A blood-brain barrier protects your brain by preventing many foreign substances in your vascular system from reaching the brain.
128. Few facts about the brain are as strange as the posthumous story of Albert Einstein’s brain.
129. Nicotine rushes into the brain in a mere 7 seconds.
130. Our brains crave mental stimulation, sometimes to a fault.
131. Men especially would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit quietly in a room and think!
132. Synesthesia is a condition where stimulation of one sense automatically evokes a perception of another sense.
133. People with synesthesia might “taste” words, “smell” sounds, or see numbers as colors.
134. While it’s not known exactly why this occurs, the prevailing theory is that these brains have hyper-connectivity between sensory areas in the brain.
135. The human brain is extraordinarily complex and consequently can go awry in some spectacular ways.
136. Some of the strangest disorders include exploding head syndrome disorder (hearing phantom explosions in your head), Cigar syndrome (thinking loved ones have been substituted by impostors, robots or aliens), and Cottar’s syndrome (believing you are dead).
137. Savant syndrome is a condition where those with serious mental disabilities have an “island of genius.”
138. Most savants are born that way, but a brain trauma can cause acquired savant syndrome where ordinary people suddenly develop genius-level abilities they didn’t have before.
139. Brain cells need a constant supply of fuel to stay alive, yet they lack the ability to store energy.
140. Your liver breaks down stored fat to produce ketone bodies that can be used as a substitute fuel when commonly-used blood glucose is not available.
141. The brain in your head isn’t your only brain.
142. There’s a “second brain” in your intestines that contains 100 million neurons.
143. Gut bacteria are responsible for making over 30 neurotransmitters including the “happy molecule” serotonin.
144. Some scientists believe zombies could actually be created.
145. They think it’s possible that a mutated virus or parasites could attack the brain and rapidly spread throughout large populations, essentially causing a “zombie apocalypse.”
146. Users of Apple devices really are different than those who use Android products. (It’s not your imagination.)
147. MRIs reveal that Apple products stimulate the “god spot” in their users’ brains — the same part of the brain activated by religious imagery in people of faith.
148. The pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy kept the brain in a jar in his basement for 40 years.
149. It is literally impossible for our brains to multi-task. When we think we’re multi-tasking, we’re actually context-switching. That is, we’re quickly switching back-and-forth between different tasks, rather than doing them at the same time.
150. It takes the brain cells only 6 minutes to react to alcohol. And drinking alcohol does not make you forget anything. When you get blackout drunk, the brain temporarily loses its ability to create memories.

Also read- 100 Interesting Psychological facts about “Attraction”

Effective Study Techniques for Students

If you like to know these intersting Psychological facts about Human Brain, So you want to know more facts like these then follow our Facebook page and Instagram page-

Facebook page-medhastone

Telegram-medhastone

Exploring the Inner World of Women: 50 Psychology Facts