- Our brain accounts for just 2% of our body weight but uses 20-25% of its energy.
- It burns oxygen and glucose at about 10 times the rate of our muscles.
- We have approximately 100 billion neurons in our brain, compared to 100 million in our gut and 40,000 in our heart (our 3 ‘brains’).
- Each of these neurons connects to other neurons via synapses. There are 500 trillion or more synapses in our brain, leading to more possible connections between brain cells than there are atoms in the universe.
- Our brains are about 5 to 7 times larger than would be expected for a mammal of our body size.
- The neo-cortex, the newer part of our brain, has tripled in volume over the past 2.5 million years.
- Our brains receive 11 million pieces of information every second, and we can only process 40 of those details consciously.
- Most of our activities and decisions are made subconsciously.
- Our brain is an incredibly sophisticated piece of ‘hardware’. Plug any ‘software’ in it and it will learn how to run it.
- Our brain is neuroplastic: it can change its structure and function based on what we do and think.
Resources:
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/fwb-media.rickhanson.net/PDFfiles/YourWonderfulBrain.pdf
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009/full
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2014.00015/full
