Things We Still Don’t Understand About The Brain

There is one small and very mysterious place in the universe – your brain. That’s right. While every healthy person is born with brains, we still know little about this biological structure. What we know for sure, is that it uses 20-25% of your daily calories and oxygen, which is a lot if you keep in mind that brain weight is only 2% of an average person’s mass. Also, it transmits electrochemical signals throughout your body, so you would be able to move and take care of yourself.

However, these facts are pretty basic and don’t give details about how the brain works. On the other hand, other organs were much easier to research, so we know much more about them than about the brain. Kidneys, eyes, skin, and the stomach are just a few examples about which we learned much sooner. The good news is that today, we have a lot better technologies and professional researchers than before. So, in recent years, studies about why we need brains and how they work gave great results and many thought-provoking ideas. Some of these ideas became facts, while others are still questionable. Want to learn about the brain’s mysteries that still have to be discovered? Then move below and find intriguing answers!
 

How Can It Work So Fast?

Many researchers say that our brain works as a supercomputer. Yet, to say that it’s a computer, even if it would be the best computer we have today, would mean that our brains are very slow. After all, your brain is at least 1,000,000 times faster than any computer.

While scientists aren’t sure how it works so fast, this could be because we have many different centers in the brain. Listening, speaking, vision, and many other centers are found in the brain, and together, form a great team that is capable of working at a super fast speed.

So, if every of these centers can work independently, this means that the brain is capable of doing many different tasks at the same time, while computers are capable of doing only one task. This means that even if computers would be as fast as the brain, they would need to be multitaskers to achieve the same speed.

Why Do We Sleep?

Perhaps you’ve heard healthy lifestyle specialists encouraging you to sleep more, right? But the fact is that they themselves aren’t sure how much sleep we need to feel better. Sleep doesn’t provide energy as food does, so it’s a great question: how it can make you energetic?

It could be because people, as well as all mammals, reptiles, and birds, need to sleep to save the needed information they get while awake. This fact could explain why people sleep more than most animals, as we do a lot more mental work, while animals concentrate on physicality and don’t need to learn less in their lives.

How Does It Decide What To Remember?

As you consciously live, you always experience something new to have something to remember. But why aren’t all memories stored, especially from the early days and while we do boring tasks?

This may be because our brains create new structures in itself, only to save the most needed information. First, thoughts come as electrochemical impulses, that if they stay in the brain for too long, start to signalize that are important and should stay in your memory by creating additional structures that could keep the new information.

So, if you learn something useless, there could be a higher chance that you’ll forget it to save nutrients, energy, and space for more important information to be stored in the future.

Is The Brain Responsible For Your Personality?

While it’s difficult to say how much the brain is responsible for how you act in life, we know that there are other important factors that influence how you decide what is right and what is wrong.

For instance, it was found that bacteria living in your gut can influence what people are thinking about. So, if you have many small “bad guys” in your digestive system, then you may be more irritated and stressed. This could mean that the brain may not be the place where your personality lives, or could only be highly influenced by other factors coming from your whole body.

How Can It Work So Well?

An astonishing thing about the brain is how it can work. Learning and remembering so many different things at once and being able to sense and do all sorts of activities at the same time is an ability even the best computers lack.

Perhaps this is due to different centres of the brain that work as “mini brains,” and do their own activities. By combining the whole information into one, different centres allow us to function properly and do activities we need to do to survive.

Also, other body parts could also help these centres do their work. For instance, did you know that some of the heart’s cells are neurons; the same cells that are found in the brain and are responsible for saving and transmitting signals?

Why Do We Dream?

Some people have difficulty remembering what they dream about. But the truth is that everyone dreams, but only some of us remember our dreams. So, if everyone dreams, then dreams should have an important meaning in our lives, right?

After all, some of them can show us the problems we have, but don’t realize that they exist. But if we dream while asleep, then how we are able to create such realistic imaginable worlds? Maybe dreams are just another world that allows us to be better prepared for what we’ll be doing in reality?

Also, there is another question: do we see dreams because we have brains?

How Changes In The Brain’s Structure Affect Our Intelligence?

It’s true that by having bigger brains, one can keep more neurons in them. Yet, it doesn’t mean that the whole brain will be full of them. Sometimes brains may be big but quite empty. Great examples of such cases are sharks and whales.

It’s more important what is inside of the brain, rather than its size. One study found that men who have smaller brains tend to be smarter than those who have big ones. A surprise? Maybe, but it only proves that neurons number is more important than a sheer size of the brain.

Another case is when people are born or for any other reasons develop abnormal brains. Sometimes, it creates difficulties in doing simple tasks like walking and talking with people but increases learning abilities of difficult sciences like physic, chemistry, maths, and many others.