We feel “hungry” because it’s harder for us to control our emotions when our brains are low on glucose.
100 Mind-Blowing Brains Facts
Bacteria on your skin cause your itches. Specifically, bacteria known as Staphylococcus aureus can release a chemical that activates a protein in our nerves. This sends a signal from our skin to our brains, which our brain perceives as an itch.
You could sweat when you’re anxious to alert others. One theory suggests we’ve evolved to sweat whilst anxious to alert the brains of other people around us so they are primed for whatever it is that’s making us anxious. Brain scans have revealed that when you sniff the sweat of a panic-induced person, regions of the brain that handle emotional and social signals light up. When you’re anxious your sympathetic nervous system releases hormones including adrenaline, which activates your sweat glands.
Your brain synapses shrink while you sleep. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Centre for Sleep and Consciousness studied mice to observe what happens to their brains while they sleep. Dr Chiara Cirelli and Dr Giulio Tononi found an 18 per cent decrease in the size of synapses after a few hours of sleep. Don’t worry, though—this nighttime brain shrinkage helps your cognitive abilities.
“Albert Einstein” is an anagram for “ten elite brains”. Seems fitting. Need more weird facts?
Relative to their bodies, Chihuahuas have the biggest brains in the dog world. Chihuahuas are very tiny, so that’s not saying a lot.
Woodpeckers would eat brains if they get too hungry. One of the darker WTF facts: If a woodpecker goes too long without food, they will pin down other birds and peck at their heads until they can eat their brains.
An actor’s brain activity is different when in character. Some actors are so good, you forget that they’re acting. However, the actors themselves seem to forget that too. During a study, researchers scanned performers’ brains while the actors answered questions either as themselves or in character. According to the results, the brain activity of participants differed between answering as themselves or as a character – almost as if the character is possessing the actor.
Over 10,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows. So much for those bird brains.
Starfish eat with their stomachs outside their body. Starfish may not have brains, but they’ve got a hell of a stomach. Mostly feeding on clams and mussels, the starfish wraps its arms around its prey’s shell and squeezes it open. The starfish then pushes its stomach out of its mouth and into the prey’s shell. Once it digests the animal inside the shell, the starfish will retract its stomach back into its body. Who knew these innocent-looking sea creatures were so hardcore?
People don’t sneeze in their sleep due to their brains shutting down the reflex.
Octopuses have blue blood and nine brains.
Left-handed people may especially use their brains. They sometimes share the work between both sides of their brain more evenly.
An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. Their little brains are genuinely smaller than one of their eyeballs.
Your brain is constantly eating itself. Called phagocytosis, this process allows cells to envelop and consume smaller cells or molecules to remove them from the system. It might sound a little scary, but it’s a good thing since it helps our brains preserve grey matter!
Our brains burn up to 400-500 calories a day.
Laughter synchronises the brains of both speaker and listener so that they become emotionally attuned.
Koalas may be cute, but they’re incredibly dumb. No, they have one of the smallest brains out of all mammals, and that’s in proportion to their body weight too! Their restrictive diet of non-nutritious eucalyptus leaves may be the cause, as this diet couldn’t possibly sustain a larger brain. To give you an idea of how clueless they are, when a koala is presented with a branch with leaves and a pile of leaves on a plate, they will eat the leaves on the branch as they cannot recognise those on the plate as food.
Stripey things like escalators and Venetian blinds can cause migraines. It turns out that our brains are simply unable to process incredibly uniform stripes, particularly vertical stripes. They increase something in our brains called gamma oscillations, which is one of the leading causes of migraines and even seizures. We’re not sure why, but it’s only artificial stripes that set us off, while the irregular stripes of a zebra are easy on the eyes.
Every person on Earth is living in the past. This may sound like the plot of some sci-fi, time-travel thriller, but it’s a fact of human biology and the trickiness of time. Our brains don’t perceive events until about 80 milliseconds after they’ve happened. This fine line between the present and the past is part of the reason why some physicists argue that there’s no such thing as “now” and that the present moment is no more than an illusion.