Top 10 Biggest Brain Damaging Habits
1. No Breakfast
People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level.This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.
2. Overreacting
It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.
3. Smoking
It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.
4. High Sugar consumption
Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.
5. Air Pollution
The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.
6. Sleep Deprivation
Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain
7. Head covered while sleeping
Sleeping with the head covered, increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.
8. Working your brain during illness
Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.
9. Talking Rarely
Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.
10. Lacking in stimulating thoughts
Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.
Thoughts
1. The average brain weighs around 3lbs.
2. Our skin weighs roughly twice as much as our brain.
3. The brain is the fattiest organ we have (It is made up of 60% fat).
4. We can’t feel pain in our brain as there are no pain receptors.
5. When we’re awake, our brain generates enough energy to power a light bulb.
6. High levels of stress can alter our brain functioning and structure.
7. Every time we have a new thought we’re creating a new pathway in the brain.
8. Scent has the strongest emotional connection of any trigger in the brain.
9. The average person is believed to have around 70,000 thoughts a day.
10. The brains of people known as supertasters are more sensitive to taste in foods and drinks.
(Source: onlinecounsellingcollege)
Brain’s Neural Pathways
Image by 3D4Medical.com/Getty Images
The human brain may contain up to one trillion neurons. These nerve cells are interconnected, as shown in this microscopic image, so that they can transmit electrical impulses—and information—to other cells.
The split brain: A tale of two halves
Since the 1960s, researchers have been scrutinizing a handful of patients who underwent a radical kind of brain surgery. The cohort has been a boon to neuroscience — but soon it will be gone.
Top Ten Myths About the Brain
When it comes to this complex, mysterious, fascinating organ, what do—and don’t—we know?
By Laura Helmuth
1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.
2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later.
3. It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
It’s true, some cognitive skills do decline as you get older. Children are better at learning new languages than adults—and never play a game of concentration against a 10-year-old unless you’re prepared to be humiliated. Young adults are faster than older adults to judge whether two objects are the same or different; they can more easily memorize a list of random words, and they are faster to count backward by sevens.
But plenty of mental skills improve with age. Vocabulary, for instance—older people know more words and understand subtle linguistic distinctions. Given a biographical sketch of a stranger, they’re better judges of character. They score higher on tests of social wisdom, such as how to settle a conflict. And people get better and better over time at regulating their own emotions and finding meaning in their lives.
4. We have five senses.
Sure, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch are the big ones. But we have many other ways of sensing the world and our place in it. Proprioception is a sense of how our bodies are positioned. Nociception is a sense of pain. We also have a sense of balance—the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision—as well as a sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time.
5. Brains are like computers.
We speak of the brain’s processing speed, its storage capacity, its parallel circuits, inputs and outputs. The metaphor fails at pretty much every level: the brain doesn’t have a set memory capacity that is waiting to be filled up; it doesn’t perform computations in the way a computer does; and even basic visual perception isn’t a passive receiving of inputs because we actively interpret, anticipate and pay attention to different elements of the visual world.
6. The brain is hard-wired.
This is one of the most enduring legacies of the old “brains are electrical circuits” metaphor.
But one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades is that the brain is remarkably plastic. In blind people, parts of the brain that normally process sight are instead devoted to hearing. Someone practicing a new skill, like learning to play the violin, “rewires” parts of the brain that are responsible for fine motor control. People with brain injuries can recruit other parts of the brain to compensate for the lost tissue.
7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia.
Next to babies switched at birth, this is a favorite trope of soap operas: Someone is in a tragic accident and wakes up in the hospital unable to recognize loved ones or remember his or her own name or history. (The only cure for this form of amnesia, of course, is another conk on the head.)
8. We know what will make us happy.
In some cases we haven’t a clue. We routinely overestimate how happy something will make us, whether it’s a birthday, free pizza, a new car, a victory for our favorite sports team or political candidate, winning the lottery or raising children. Money does make people happier, but only to a point—poor people are less happy than the middle class, but the middle class are just as happy as the rich. We overestimate the pleasures of solitude and leisure and underestimate how much happiness we get from social relationships.
9. We see the world as it is.
We are not passive recipients of external information that enters our brain through our sensory organs. Instead, we actively search for patterns (like a Dalmatian dog that suddenly appears in a field of black and white dots), turn ambiguous scenes into ones that fit our expectations (it’s a vase; it’s a face) and completely miss details we aren’t expecting. In one famous psychology experiment, about half of all viewers told to count the number of times a group of people pass a basketball do not notice that a guy in a gorilla suit is hulking around among the ball-throwers.
10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.
ScienceShot: A Brain Wave Worth a Thousand Words
If it wasn’t enough that scientists could read your memories, they can now listen in on them, too. In a new study, neuroscientists connected a network of electrodes to the hearing centers of 15 patients’ brains (image above) and recorded the brain activity while they listened to words like “jazz” or “Waldo.” They saw that each word generated its own unique pattern in the brain. So they developed two different computer programs that could reconstruct the words a patient heard just by analyzing his or her brain activity. Reconstructions from the better of the two programs (the third sound in the audio; the first sound is the word the subjects heard, and the second is the other computer program’s reconstruction) were good enough that the researchers could accurately decipher the mystery word 80% to 90% percent of the time. Because there’s evidence that the words we hear and the words we recall or imagine trigger similar brain processes, the study, published online today in PLoS Biology, suggests scientists may one day be able to tune in to the words you’re thinking—a potential boon for patients who are unable to speak due to Lou Gehrig’s disease or other conditions.
See more ScienceShots.
Why Do We Yawn? It May Keep Us From Getting Hot-Headed
Yawning may activate a sinus “pump” that ventilates our brains.
In the Image: Chinese paramilitary police officers in Beijing.
Yawning may help you keep a cool head—literally, a new study suggests. The findings might hold some hope for sufferers of insomnia, migraines, and even epilepsy.
Though scientists have put forth various theories for yawning—from fatigue to lack of oxygen—none have held up to scrutiny.
“We can put a man on the moon, but we do not understand what the function of yawning is,” said study co-author Gary Hack, of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry in Baltimore.
Now, Hack and co-author Andrew Gallup, of Princeton University, propose that yawning causes the walls of the maxillary sinus to expand and contract like a bellows, pumping air onto the brain, which lowers its temperature. Located in our cheekbones, the maxillary are the largest of four pairs of sinus cavities in the human head.
Sinus Solution?
In addition to potentially solving the mystery of yawning, the study may also reveal why we have sinuses, whose existence has also stumped scientists.
It’s a “unified theory tying yawning, sinus ventilation, and brain cooling into a neat little package,” Hack said.
Ryan Soose—an ear, nose, and throat doctor as well as director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Division of Sleep Surgery—added, “The hypothesis that these two relatively unknown things may be directly related, to me, is very intriguing.”
Cadaverous Clues
In 2002 study co-author Hack and his team were dissecting a cadaver when they discovered that the back wall of the maxillary sinus was much thinner—and therefore more flexible—than described in many medical textbooks.
“I’d always kept that in the back of my mind, because yawning was an exaggerated jaw movement that would have an impact on this previously undescribed pump in humans,” Hack said.
Later, he came across the postdoctoral research of Princeton’s Gallup, who in 2007 had become the first to suggest the brain-cooling theory for yawning.
Yawning Theory May Influence Medicine
Overall, understanding yawning could be a useful tool for diagnosing certain medical conditions, such as epilepsy and migraines, which are both preceded by excessive yawning, the scientists say.
Credits:
Published November 15, 2011
![Scientists Can Now Actually Read Your Mind
In a series of new experiments, scientists have been able to use a computer to decipher brain activity. So what, huh? Well, the computer can reconstruct those signals into the actual words the participants are thinking about. It can read your mind.
OK, so sometimes the words were difficult to recognise, but that’s not the point: it means that people unable to speak could generate a voice just by thinking in sentences.
“Potentially, the technique could be used to develop an implantable prosthetic device to aid speaking, and for some patients that would be wonderful,” Robert Knight, a senior member of the team and director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Guardian. “Perhaps in 10 years it will be as common as grandmother getting a new hip.”
The experiment involved 15 patients having the top of their skull removed — don’t worry, they were already having surgery that required that — and having a net of electrodes laid across the surface of their brain.
The patients were then played a series of words for five to ten minutes while having their brain activity recorded. Software was then used to decode the brain signals and reconstruct the words. The research is published in PLoS Biology.
For now, reading someone’s mind like this is an invasive process requiring access to the brain, but that’s not to say it always will be. The idea of creating a device that could help give people a voice would surely cause some headaches, not least the problem of filtering private thoughts from information to be communicated. But scientists love a challenge. [PLoS Biology andThe Guardian; Image: dierk schaefer]
Republished from http://gizmodo.com](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyrqy822MH1qbkzabo1_500.jpg)
Scientists Can Now Actually Read Your Mind
In a series of new experiments, scientists have been able to use a computer to decipher brain activity. So what, huh? Well, the computer can reconstruct those signals into the actual words the participants are thinking about. It can read your mind.
OK, so sometimes the words were difficult to recognise, but that’s not the point: it means that people unable to speak could generate a voice just by thinking in sentences.
“Potentially, the technique could be used to develop an implantable prosthetic device to aid speaking, and for some patients that would be wonderful,” Robert Knight, a senior member of the team and director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Guardian. “Perhaps in 10 years it will be as common as grandmother getting a new hip.”
The experiment involved 15 patients having the top of their skull removed — don’t worry, they were already having surgery that required that — and having a net of electrodes laid across the surface of their brain.
The patients were then played a series of words for five to ten minutes while having their brain activity recorded. Software was then used to decode the brain signals and reconstruct the words. The research is published in PLoS Biology.
For now, reading someone’s mind like this is an invasive process requiring access to the brain, but that’s not to say it always will be. The idea of creating a device that could help give people a voice would surely cause some headaches, not least the problem of filtering private thoughts from information to be communicated. But scientists love a challenge. [PLoS Biology andThe Guardian; Image: dierk schaefer]
Republished from http://gizmodo.com
A computer chip that emulates the human brain – and might one day replace it
Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons. There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories.
But we still don’t understand how all the connections between those neurons work. Now researchers at MIT and Harvard have created a new computer chip model that could change that in a big way.
