Mind-Blowing Facts about the Human Brain

despite only weighing about three pounds being mostly made up of bats and water your brain is one of the most fascinating and complicated objects in the entire universe it's so full of mysteries and surprises these are the title of the final biological Frontier a frontier that Humanity has only really been able to study for the last century or so but just in that short time we've uncovered some truly spectacular things about the brain and today we could have a look at some of them [Music] foreign [Music] that the brain is incredibly complicated as we mentioned at the beginning of today's video it's the most complex object that we know of in the entire universe but simply stating this fact doesn't really do it justice so let's break it down the basic cells the brain are composed of are called neurons which are highly complicated on their own put simply a typical neuron has spindly arms called dendrites that receive electrical or chemical signals from other neurons these signals are received by the cell body and then passed along by the use of the neurons axon which you could picture as a sort of Cannon which fires the signals onto the next neuron continuing the cycle and sending signals around your nervous system while totally insane is that the human brain is composed of an estimated 86 billion of these neurons almost as many stars as there are in the entire Milky Way galaxy and because each individual neuron can connect with up to a thousand others the brain contains a staggering 60 trillion neural connect what's even crazier is just how specialized many of these neurons are the brain contains many different regions responsible for different functions in the body such as the brain stem which regulates automatic functions like blood pressure digestion and other things that you never have to think about or there's the cerebellum which controls your body's balance and yes if you're wondering the myth that you only use 10 of your brain is utter but it is you're subconsciously using large portions of your brain constant today's video is sponsored by brilliant imagine having access to thousands of interactive lessons on maths data science and computer science all in one place well guess what brilliant makes that a reality brilliant is more than just a learning platform it's a fun and interactive journey to knowledge they cover everything from logic and data analysis to AI programming and even how everyday technology works with new lessons added every month there's always something absurdly interesting to discover one of the things I love about brilliant is how they personalize their learning experience no matter your skill level brilliant caters to your needs and lets you learn at your own pace when you sign up brilliant takes a quick quiz to match you with content that suits your interests and your skill level so whether you're just starting out or you're ready to program for a quantum computer they've got you covered if you're unsure where to start with programming Brilliance thinking in code course is perfect for you you'll design simple programs to solve real world problems like navigating Maps or creating an automatic work message responder it's Hands-On learning at its finest brilliant is the essential tool for advancing your career boosting your analytical skills and staying up to date with world changing technology it's built for busy people allowing you to master big Concepts in as little as 15 minutes a day anytime anywhere whether on your phone tablet or computer you can get started with brilliant absolutely free for 30 days plus a special bonus the first 200 of you who sign up will get 20 off brilliant annual premium subscription just visit brilliant.org forward slash side projects or click the link in the description to embark on your learning adventure don't miss out on this incredible opportunity and thanks again to brilliant for sponsoring and now back to today's video in fact you're using nearly 50 of your entire brain just to process various aspects of your vision While most functions in the body can indeed be linked to a specific region of the brain there is one that isn't so simple memory our incredible memory is what makes humans truly unique because our ability to learn and adapt at a rapid pace is what allowed our species to advance to its current state but where do all these memories get stored and there's not exactly a straight answer for starters different types of memories are handled by different regions such as the hippocampus a seahorse-shaped structure which is mostly responsible for long-term informational memory or there's the basal ganglia which handles muscle memory but it isn't quite as simple as correlating a single neuron with a single memory memories are best thought of as neural Pathways or patterns of activation meaning one neuron can participate in many different Memories the more often these pathways are activated the stronger they become making the memory sharper so with the insane amount of neurons in the brain and the even more insane amount of total neural connections just too much memory can be stored in your mind well according to psychology Professor Paul rabbit the total capacity of our brain is somewhere in the ballpark of 2.5 petabytes which is 2.5 million gigabytes however this estimate was given in 2011 in the years since several universities have published papers estimating that the total could actually be 10 times this previous estimate a truly unbelievable amount of storage space that we could never hope to fill in a lifetime and it manages this all we're running on only about 20 watts of electricity less than your average light bulb [Music] so there's a common myth that the left and right arms of the brain are responsible for different functions such as a left brain person being more logically orientated and a right brain person being more creative this has absolutely no basis in reality and people are on one side dominant but it is actually true that the different sides of the brain do handle very slightly different responsibilities for starters HR for the brain controls the opposite half of the body meaning that your left hemisphere sends and receives signals from your right arm and the right half of your brain communicates with your left arm the left half of your visual field from both eyes is processed by the right half of the brain and vice versa it's a bit counter-intuitive but normally the strange asymmetry has no bearing on your day-to-day life because each half of your brain actively communicates with the other through the Corpus callosuma network of neural Pathways that connects the two hemispheres combining the two halves into your single Center of awareness that you're accustomed to things start to get a little bit interesting oh and we cut that connection in half for no this isn't just some sick experiment severing the connection between the two halves of the brain is actually a legitimate medical procedure a surgery known as a Corpus callasotomy this surgery is performed as a last-ditch effort to treat severe epileptic seizures where no other treatments are effective this prevents the two halves of the brain from rapidly sending epileptic signals to each other and it can be highly effective at eliminating the threat of seizures but it does come as you might expect with a few interesting side effects when split brain patients are shown an image only in the left half of their Vision they cannot verbally say out loud what it is that they see this is because the image is sent from the eyes to the right half of the brain that most people's speech center is located in the left half of the brain without the ability to communicate with the half that's actually seeing what's there the speech center has no clue what's going on the same thing happens if the left hand holds a familiar object out of sight like a bottle of water for instance when asked what is in their hand the split brain patient will struggle to find the words however because half of their brain did see or feel the object if you wait a couple of minutes and then ask the patient to pick out the object that they were just holding from a list in front of them they'll have no problem deciding they just can't use words to do it but if you perform these tests with the object in the right hand or in the right visual field the information will present on the same side as the speech center and the patient will have no problem answering questions and naming the objects out loud it is important to note however this is the case in the majority of patients but not all the most fascinating split brain results thus far are those of patient Kim peek a savant who from a young age demonstrated incredible cognitive ability such as memorizing nearly 10 000 books including the entire King James Bible and he knew basically everything about world history geography music and could give you detailed directions for navigating every major American city in fact one of his Hobbies was memorizing phone books what set Kim apart from the rest of History's Geniuses though was the fact that he was born with severe brain abnormalities including an enlarged head sac-like cranial structures and critically he was born without the corpus callosum naturally disconnecting the two halves of his brain from birth because of this he was able to utilize both hemispheres of his brain simultaneously and could View and read the left and right pages of a book at the same time strangely he also had language centers present in both halves of his brain something not seen often foreign this scenario you're a soldier celebrating the end of the second world war and you're about to return home to your home country now that the Allies are victorious unfortunately Iran returning in exactly the same condition at which you arrived at the war thanks to an explosion oh which damaged your right arm unfortunately this led to its amputation now you've come to terms with your new one-armed life but pretty soon something strange starts to happen in the middle of the night your missing arm begins to itch and soon you feel like the missing hand is painfully squeezing its fist digging your non-existent fingernails into your palm but how can that be if the arm is no longer there well that's what's known as a phantom limb a sensation in a body part that's no longer there about 80 of amputees report some form of phantom limb sensation ranging from itching to twitching to painful muscle spasms or having the feeling of a clenched fist that can't be released the science behind Phantom Sensations took a long time to figure out in the late 1800s when the peculiar symptoms were first reported it was believed to be the result of the remaining nerve tissue surrounding the amputation site but we've since learned that it's all in your head and here's how in a little strip of neurons called the somatosensory cortex your brain has your entire body mapped out with each body part corresponding to a specific place on this cortex scientists have mapped this out pretty accurately and using electrical stimulation in the right spot they can actually elicit bodily Sensations when a part of your body is lost say your arm this piece of the brain responsible for it is still there neurosartist vs ramachandran hypothesized that reorganization of the neurons in this location or the stimulation of the tissue surrounding it could be responsible for the Phantom Sensations a theory supported by his shocking findings that touching certain parts of a patient's face was felt in their missing limb turns out this is because the neural map of the body has the hands and the face adjacent to each other and when the map of the hand has nothing to do it can begin activating along with its neighbor you can think of areas of the brain as not wanting to be unim employed and often quickly finding new tasks to keep themselves busy something that we'll get to in a bit treating Phantom limb syndrome was regarded as a somewhat lost cause for quite some time ketamine morphine antidepressants and electroshock therapy were tried and it seemed like all treatments were doomed to be ineffective except for one a mirror box designed by Dr Ram chandran the mirror box is a simple yet ingenious invention designed to trick your brain to use the mirror trick on for example a missing left arm the patient inserts their right arm into the box which has a mirror on the one side blocking the view of the missing arm but giving the brain the illusion that it is present in their Vision the patient then does their best to imagine control over the missing limb while performing movements that would require both hands to make symmetrical movements such as clapping even though the patient consciously knows that the left arm is merely a reflection of the right the brain itself is rather easily fooled and the result is often the relief of phantom pain or discomfort as the brain perceives normal control once again what's crazy about this trick is that it doesn't just work on people missing a limb it's been shown to also be effective at helping stroke patients recover some of their control over the weekend half of their body but even if your body is completely without damage you can still trick this part of the brain in a classic experiment subjects Place their right arm on a table and their left arm underneath the table in place of their left arm a prosthetic is placed on the table vaguely seeming to attach to their body the experiment will then gently touch both the prosthetic and the real hands with a paintbrush in an identical manner giving the brain the illusion that the prosthetic arm is the real one then when the experimenter casually swings a hammer at the fake arm the patient will jump backward out of instinct even though they are consciously aware that the arm is not real foreign things we said about the brain it does have one major flaw which lies in the fact that being so insanely complex mean that there's a practically unending list of things that can go wrong from concussions to Strokes any damage to your brain has the potential to change the way it or your body functions and in some pretty peculiar ways say for example damaged the amygdala the amygdala is an almond-shaped part of the brain responsible for a vast range of emotions but specifically it is highly involved with processing fear you might think that feeling no fear would be some sort of advantage in your life but it's actually quite the opposite people with damage their amygdala may lose the sense of emotional restraint that prevents them from taking extreme risks this could lead to things like excessive gambling or in more severe cases highly dangerous activities like casually strolling across busy streets but things can get even stranger it's logical enough that if you receive an injury to the part of the brain responsible for processing Vision you could go blind but it's actually possible to lose only certain aspects of your vision for example if someone suffers from a condition called optic Ataxia they have no problem seeing and understanding the world around them but the moment they try and reach for an object they can't seem to accurately grab it one of the first patients to report these symptoms noted that his right hand was especially clumsy and that he would often light his cigarette in the middle instead of the end or just miss it altogether however with his eyes closed he could point a parts of his body with perfect Precision meaning that oddly enough the issue only arose when the task required the combined efforts of both vision and muscle control another unusual condition is called spatial neglect which can occur as a result of a recent stroke patients with spatial neglect lack attention and awareness of half of their Vision usually of the opposite side of where the damage occurred and produce some peculiar results and experiments for example one famous case involves a patient who is asked to draw a clock a house and a flower and was even given an example to copy the result was this peculiar set of half-drawn images with the left half of each object completely ignored but the patient of course saw no issue stranger still is a condition called echinotopsia or motion blindness thankfully it's an extremely rare condition with only a few dozen cases ever reported Simpsons range from seeing the world as if it were choppy like viewing every other frame of a film reel but in more extreme cases sufferers have a complete inability to perceive motion and objects seem to appear and disappear out of their Vision as they move past this is all of course despite having completely normal vision if everything is stationary and you can probably see how disruptive this would be to day-to-day life when pouring water into a glass it would appear empty and then half full and then suddenly it would be overflowing or when crossing the street it would be difficult to judge how fast a car is moving towards you as it blinks from place to place experiencing a real life like a sort of online video game with a bad connection [Music] while it is true that there are just about a million things that can go wrong in the brain there is something to be said for how resilient it is one of the brain's most impressive abilities is called neuroplasticity or the ability to adapt learn and rewire itself plasticity is very high as an infant and tends to decline with age this is part of the reason children learn their first language or languages so quickly and why it's harder to learn new skills later in life but it's not only about learning new tricks in a Harvard study done in 2004 participants were completely blindfolded for 96 hours meaning that the eyes were sending virtually no information to the brain the area of the brain responsible for many aspects of vision the occipital lobe had absolutely nothing to do no signals to interpret no motion to detect nothing after just a day the majority of patients began experiencing Vivid hallucinations in their Dark World with reports of terrifying green faces lamps numerous mirrors and floating puzzle pieces brain scans showed that the occipital lobe was indeed active during these hallucinations as it tried to grasp with a lack of visual stimuli but as the study went on the hallucination subsided especially as the subjects began participating in various tactile experiments such as feeling for details on intricate play structures and learning to read Braille for four hours a day what shocked the researchers though was that not only did the brain quickly cope with the lack of stimuli but it began repurposing the visual Center that was no longer being used brain scans showed that during tactile experiments and Braille reading participants occipital lobes were activating helping them learn the tasks more quickly and perform them more effectively as we mentioned before areas of the brain don't like to be unemployed and they quickly found a new job the experimenter noted to quote they were seeing with the tip of their finger I was expecting changes but not this rapid interestingly after the blindfolds were removed at the end of the study the eyes functioned just as they had a few days earlier and everything on their brain scans simply returned to normal however many of the skills they learned during the trial such as reading Braille were lost once this extra brain matter returned to its original purpose of visual perception this fascinating Discovery showed that the brain was far from rigid and that even as adults it has the ability to rapidly adapt to new circumstances all of these discoveries and more are being unraveled in the Modern Age and there's no telling what incredible findings are awaiting us about Consciousness cognition and a whole lot more in the very near future foreign [Music]

Channel: Sideprojects

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Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects, sideprojects, mind blowing facts about the human brain, facts about the human brain, top 10 amazing facts about human brain, facts about human brain, facts about the brain, amazing facts about human brain in english, facts about human body, facts about your brain, scary facts about your brain, mind blowing facts, human brain, brain facts shorts video, human brain facts, human brain facts in english, facts about brain

Id: Hz6vlHcbBRA

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023