10 Brain Facts

Each and every second of your life, several billion bits of information pass through your brain.

Messages within your brain travel through trillions of neural connections at speeds up to 250 miles per hour.

Your brain generates 25 watts of power while you are awake - enough to illuminate an light bulb.

Your brain uses 20% of your body's energy - while accounting for only 2% of your body weight.

Juggling has shown to change the brain in as little as seven days. The studyindicates that learning new things helps the brain to change very quickly.

The average number of thoughts that humans are believed to experience each day is 70,000.

Boredom  s brought on by a lack of change of stimulation, is largely a function of perception, and is connected to the innate curiosity found in humans.

There is no sense of pain within the brain itself. This fact allows neurosurgeons to probe areas of the brain while the patient is awake. Feedback from the patient during these probes is useful for identifying important regions, such as those for speech, that are spared if possible.

A child's ability to learn can increase or decrease by 25 percent or more, depending on whether he or she grows up in a stimulating environment.

It's no accident that telephone numbers in the United States are seven digits long. Our working memory, a very short-term form of memory which stores ideas just long enough for us to understand them, can hold on average seven digits.