About 3 pounds. That's all your brain weighs. Yet it is sooooo amazing what it does!
In honor of brain awareness week, here are a few fun brain facts:
- Your 3 pound brain uses 20% of the blood and oxygen that your whole body uses
- When awake, your brain uses enough electricity to power a small light bulb (+/- 15 watts)
- 60% of your brain is fat
- "Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia" is the scientific term for "brain freeze"
- Some neurons send information around your brain as fast as 268 miles per hour
- Your brain weighs about HALF as much as your skin
- The brain has no pain receptors and therefore can feel no pain about itself
- There are about 100,000 MILES of blood vessels in the brain (that's 4 times around the globe!)
- You can’t tickle yourself because your brain can distinguish between unexpected external touch and your own self touch
- Anomia is the technical word for that "tip-of-the-tongue" situation when you can almost recall a word, but it just won’t quite come to you
- Laughing at a joke is requires activity in FIVE different areas of the brain.
- Harvard maintains a Brain Bank where over 7,000 human brains are kept for research purposes
That was fun!
But, sadly in our elderly care business in West Chester, Pottstown, Collegeville and surrounding areas, we all too often deal with individuals with brain disease, mainly Alzheimer's Disease.
For more on Alzheimer's Disease, you can visit a previous year's brain awareness week blog by clicking here. Or visit our many blog topics on Dementia Care by clicking here.