March 9: The Human Brain

Born on this date in 1758 was Franz Joseph Gall, German/French physician, pioneer in the study of the localisation of mental functions in the brain. 10 facts about brains:

1. An average sized human brain weighs about 3 pounds/1.3 kg. 60% of it is fat. The surface area of a human brain is about 230-470 square inches (1,500-3,000 sq. cm), about the size of a pillowcase.
2. The human brain has around 100,000 miles of Blood vessels, and uses 20% of all the blood and Oxygen in the body.
3. There are words for the folds and smooth areas of the brain. The folds are called sulcus (Latin for “furrow”) and the smooth bits between the folds are called gyrus (Latin for “circle”).
4. As long ago as 4000 B.C. people were writing about the brain. An anonymous Sumerian scientist wrote about the effects of eating Poppies on the mind. The earliest description found of the anatomy of the brain was an ancient Egyptian scroll dating back to 1700 B.C. in which the Egyptians describe the wrinkles in the brain, the fluid surrounding it, and set out how to treat 26 different types of head injury.
5. For a long time, physicians thought the organ responsible for thought and emotion was the Heart rather than the brain. Alcmaeon of Croton was the first to claim that it was the brain which was responsible for these functions, in the 6th century BC.
6. The human brain consists of approximately 100 billion neurons (which is as many cells as there are stars in the Milky Way). Lined up, they would stretch 600 miles. Each neuron has between 1,000 and 10,000 synapses, so there are around 1 quadrillion synapses in a human brain. There are over 100,000 chemical reactions happening in the human brain every second.
7. It's a common myth that we only use 10% of our brains. In fact, pretty much all of our brains are working pretty much all of the time. It's not true, either, that we don't get any new neurons after the age of two. Our brains keep on developing until we are in our 40s.
8. Although the brain is responsible for us feeling pain in other parts of our bodies, there are no pain receptors in the brain itself, so the brain itself cannot feel pain.
9. A human brain can produce 10-23 watts of energy while awake - enough to power a light bulb.
10. The heaviest known normal human brain belonged to the Russian Writer Ivan Turgenev, who died in 1883. His brain weighed 4.43 pounds. The lightest belonged to a woman who died in 1977, which weighed 2.41 pounds. In the animal kingdom, the largest brain belongs to the sperm whale. Their brains weigh up to 20 pounds.

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