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15 Facts about Human Brain

robina-weermeijer-so1L3jsdD3Y-unsplash (1)Here are 15 fascinating facts about the human brain that will wow you:

  1. Recollection practice can help with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
  2. Having easy access to knowledge can make it difficult to remember.
  3. The human brain begins to slow about the age of 24.
  4. It consumes 20% of the entire oxygen and energy in the body.
  5. The brain itself cannot experience pain
  6. 95% of all decisions are made subconsciously.
  7. Memories begin to form in the womb.
  8. Emotion prioritizes memory.
  9. The human brain consists of 73% water
  10. It is unable to develop memories while drunk.
  11. It produces 12-15 watts of electricity.
  12. Vitamin B1 can boost both short- and long-term memory. Fruit and vegetables that are common sources include cauliflower, oranges, potatoes, asparagus, and kale. Other sources include liver, eggs, and brewer’s yeast.
  13. Five minutes without oxygen can result in brain damage.
  14. Sweating can cause temporary brain shrinkage.
  15. Learning new things increases the amount of grey matter in the brain.
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Interesting Facts about Human Memory

1. The human mind can form, amplify, or reinvent a memory.

2. Short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM) are two different types of memories. Short term memory can hold 7±2 things for up to 20 seconds. Information received from the environment, first passes through short term memory before it becomes the part of long term memory.

3. Humans start to form memories when they are in the womb. This memory is described as prenatal or fetal memory. Various experiments have revealed that babies are capable of remembering sounds that were played to them during pregnancy.

4. The storage capacity of the human brain is practically limitless. Human brain can store approximately 2.5 petabytes of data, which means that human brain has as much memory as the entire internet.

5. Apparently, aging does not seem to have any direct effect on memory. People experience memory loss during old age merely because they use it less as they age.

6. The human mind can remember things that didn’t even occur. This obvious recollection of something that one did not actually experience is known as false memory. This phenomenon was demonstrated in an experiment where the interviewer was successfully able to convince 70% of the participants that they had committed a crime, when, in fact, they had not.

7. In the absence of rehearsal, memories become harder to access, this means that memories, in actual, do not decay.

8. During jet lag, certain stress hormones are released, which have been found to damage the memory.

9. While a person is drunk, he or she is not capable of creating memories.

10. There is no specific region in the brain where a given memory exists. Instead, it is distributed in different regions of the brain.

11. Memory is reconstructed from distinct fragments in order to be recalled.

12. Human memories are prioritized by the emotions. Emotions attach new information and function as an indicator of significance. Memories that are emotionally intense can last longer in the mind and can be recalled much more clearly.

13. Procrastination is an important tool of memory. Not focusing on something actively gives the subconscious time to work on the ideas in the background while the person performs other things.

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Sleep Well to Travel Well — Thrive Global

Ample research links sleep quality and quantity to performance including alertness, memory, creativity, cognitive reaction times and accuracy. Even so, studies of US workers report many people show up to work feeling too tired to perform their best. With competing priorities, sleep is often the first thing to go. And even those of us with relatively decent sleep practices at home struggle to get quality sleep when traveling for work. I’ve been focusing on improving my sleep habits for years and offer the following five strategies to try the next time your work takes you on the road.

via Sleep Well to Travel Well — Thrive Global

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5 Effects That Migraines Can Have On Your Mental Health

Migraines are so much more than a painful headache. Those that experience migraines on a regular basis often report that they have a detrimental impact on their mental health. There are several health concerns that arise as a result of migraines, and many others that go hand-in-hand with them. People without adequate information about the issues migraines can cause may dismiss symptoms, meaning that the chance for diagnosis is missed until later on.

If you suffer from migraines and want to find out more, read on for 5 effects that they can have on your mental health:

What is a Migraine?

A migraine is a throbbing pain on one side of the head that is persistent. The pain is typically described as being moderate to severe. It can also induce symptoms such as feeling nauseous, being sick, and increased sensitivity to light or sound. They affect 1 in every 5 women and 1 in every 15 men. It’s also been suggested that migraines could be hereditary, as you’re more likely to get migraines if you have a close relative with the condition. There are different types of migraine:

Migraine with aura – when there are specific warning signs before the migraine such as seeing flashes of light.

Migraine without aura – when migraines happen without warning.

Migraine aura without headache (silent migraine) – where an aura or other migraine symptoms are experienced, but the actual headache pain doesn’t develop.

   1. Depression

If your migraines occur once in a while, then you have double the risk of depression than someone who doesn’t get them at all. Similarly, if you experience chronic migraines which occur several times a month, your risk doubles again. There is such a strong link between depression and migraines because often, people with migraines can become depressed because of the terrible pain.

On the other hand, depression can also come first, soon to be followed by painful migraines. People with migraines are three times more likely to have depression and patients with depression are also three times more likely to have a migraine. It causes patients to feel sad, hopeless, fatigued, and disinterested in things they used to enjoy.

   2. Anxiety

Of those suffering from migraines, around 50%-60% will suffer from anxiety. In fact, people with chronic migraines are more likely to have anxiety than they are depression. Similar to depression, the anxiety or the migraines can come first. During a migraine attack, anxiety is often based on worry directly related to the attack, such as wondering how long it will last and when the medication will start to work.

Even when the patient isn’t experiencing a migraine, they might become anxious about when their next one will be. Interestingly, patients that have anxiety in life are more likely to develop migraines, and vice versa. If the patient suffers from depression and anxiety, they may need to take separate medication to treat each condition individually.

   3. Increased Fatigue

Many people who experience chronic migraines also feel fatigued. This level of fatigue can last a long time and cannot always be cured with a good night’s sleep. Fatigue can then have a knock-on effect on your mental health, as you start to feel sluggish and less engaged. This can cause depression or add to the symptoms of pre-existing depression. What’s more, blurred vision and poor co-ordination can also be a side-effect of fatigue. If a patient experiences fatigue, they are more likely to take time off work until they feel well enough to return. Wellness retreats or specialist aesthetic clinic Manchester offers can leave them feeling more rejuvenated and less tired.

   4. Changes in Your Mood

Migraines often develop in distinct stages for many people, the first of which is a change in your mood. In the same way that anxiety can cause patients to worry about an attack, patients can experience a change in their mood before it happens.

Changes in energy levels, behaviour and appetite can occur several hours or even days before having a migraine attack. Then, the actual headache stage occurs, where patients will experience the pulsating or throbbing pain on one side of the head. After, is the resolution stage. Again, at this time, patients are more likely to experience changes in their mood which can last a few days.

   5. Poor Memory

An acute confusional migraine (ACM) is a rare type of migraine that primarily affects teenagers and children. Many are still left undiagnosed but affects around 10% of children and teenagers. When experiencing an acute confusional migraine attack, one of the main symptoms is memory loss. Other symptoms include disorientation, blurred vision and speech impairment. Though this memory loss is only temporary, there is evidence to suggest chronic migraines can impact memory permanently. However, this is still very much a topic undergoing research.

Source link: https://www.psyarticles.com/health/migraine.htm

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7 Unconscious Errors We Make When Buying Brands

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The way we decide to buy brands is mind-blowing.

Here are seven fascinating mental mistakes we make when purchasing the products and services we use every day. Since these errors are made unconsciously, we need to first become aware of them. Recognizing the irrationality of our decisions can help us make more informed, sensible choices and save money.

via 7 Unconscious Errors We Make When Buying Brands

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Brain Vitamins: The Top Vitamins & Minerals for Your Mind — Dr. Eddy Bettermann MD

Source: Brain Vitamins: The Top Vitamins & Minerals for Your Mind by Dr. Edward Group You may have heard that taking extra vitamins can improve your memory, protect against Alzheimer’s disease, or help you ace that test. Are “brain vitamins” really a thing? In reality, a debate exists over whether vitamins can boost your brain health. […]

via Brain Vitamins: The Top Vitamins & Minerals for Your Mind — Dr. Eddy Bettermann MD

 

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12 Strategies to Boost Your Memory

We all forget things once in a while. And most times we don’t even pay attention to this problem until and unless we find ourselves in a demanding situation. Memory loss is not something to be taken too lightly and we ought to make conscious efforts to improve our ability to memorize, retain, and recall information. Although there is no sure shot way to prevent dementia, certain techniques may go a long way in helping you improve your memory and increase your brain’s potential in general. Here are 12 strategies that can effectively boost your memory and help you remember and recall better:

1. Focus your attention: In order to store information in your memory storage system, you need to take interest in the information presented to you and give it your full attention. Information is more likely to get lost when you pay half attention to it. While reading or meeting people for the first time, give your full attention.

2. Visual/Imagery: While attending to the information add visual imagery to the information. We are better able to remember things that are visual. So while reading for an exam, use imagery as much as possible.

3. Associate: Associating new information with the information you already know or have can also help you better memorize new information. Associations help create more mental connections of the information which, in turn, helps in better retention of the memory of that information.

4. Chunking: This technique can help you memorize a large set of information by breaking the information into small chunks or groups. In other words, the information to be remembered is divided into small chunks or groups of information. For example, if you need to memorize a phone number- xxyyyzzxxx, you can make chunks of this number—xx/yyy/zz/xxx.

5. Get good sleep: Our brain gets to consolidate the day’s information during sleep. Consolidation is a process in which short-term memory is transferred into long-term memory. In order to improve your memory you need to get a quality sleep of 7-8 hours daily, whereas, lack of proper sleep can affect your memory negatively. That is the reason students are advised to get a good sleep before an exam.

6. Mnemonics: Use of mnemonic techniques can also help to memorize better. Mnemonics are specific techniques designed to improve recall. Like using first letters of the given information to form a word, for example using VIBGYOR to memorize the colors of rainbow.

7. Brain exercises: Just like any other muscle in the body our brain is also a kind of muscle that needs exercise to work at optimum level. In order to enhance memory, play brain games. Solving puzzles, crossword, Sudoku, and playing word-recall games etc. have been proven to boost memory.

8. Be active while learning: There is a saying that individuals remember 20 per cent of what they hear, 75 per cent of what they see, and 90 per cent of what they do. And this saying is fairly correct. Being active while learning something like movement of arms, pacing back and forth, and using gestures while learning a new information has been found to enhance memorization. So keep your body actively involved while learning.

9. Recite: Repeating something in a loud voice can help memorization of that information better. As you recite you involve another sense, i.e., hearing. This helps better anchoring of the information in your brain. You can also recite what you have learned to another person in your own simple words and language. This technique is especially effective for students.

10. Meditation: Meditation has been found to improve memory. Mediation helps lower the stress which, in turn, is known to affect memorization. Meditation has also been found to improve the gray matter in brain, which positively affects memory. Practice meditation on daily basis for healthy mind and body.

11. Exercise: Scientists have proven that daily exercise as simple as running or jogging can help in formation of new neurons in brain and can help improve memory. Exercising daily not only keeps you physically fit but it also keeps your brain fit.

12. Keep stress away: As mentioned above, too much of stress has been found to affect memorization and recall both. Chronic stress has also been found to damage brain cells, especially in hippocampus which is responsible for retrieval of old memories and formation of new memories. So in order to improve your memory you also need to keep your stress level under check.

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Cryptomnesia

Woman sitting on the typewriterCryptomnesia refers to a memory bias by which a person recalls a memory but misidentifies it as a new thought. This eerie process causes a forgotten memory to return without being recognized as a memory. The person does not consciously engage in plagiarism but he or she experiences the recollection as if it were a new or his own original idea. In social situations, cryptomnesia often comes up as an annoying idiosyncrasy, but it has far greater relevance for, and may result in serious consequences, in the art world. For instance, an artist or an author may commit plagiarism without even realizing what is happening. According to psychologists, cryptomnesia is a source-monitoring error which happens when we fail to register the source of information. As human brain amasses memories, details are ranked. In this filtering process, the origins of facts often fall secondary to the facts themselves. Cryptomnesia may, in fact, be a byproduct of an otherwise efficient memory system.

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Does Sport Enhance Your Academics? — Human Performance Psychology

The studies made on athletic and non/athletic people, have consistently demonstrated that physically active people remain healthier and are able to perform better on tests of cerebral or intellectual ability. Some studies even indicate that the results are sharp and immediate – even a quick 5-minute walk can yield immediate results. Most studies show that […]

via Does Sport Enhance Your Academics? — Human Performance Psychology

 

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Memories: How Do They Form and Fade?

Have you ever wondered why some of your childhood memories are still fresh in your mind even after decades, while some recent ones fade in minutes? Researchers have recently discovered the neural processes that cause some memories to fade quickly while making other memories stable over time.

Using mouse models, researchers from California Institute of Technology have determined that strong, stable memories are encoded by “teams” of neurons all working in synchrony, providing redundancy that enables these memories to stay over time. The study helps in understanding how brain damage due to strokes or Alzheimer’s disease may affect memory.

Published in the journal, Science, the study was conducted at Biology research professor, Carlos Lois’s laboratory. The professor is also an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.

The team, led by Walter Gonzalez, a postdoctoral scholar developed a test to examine mice’s neural activity as they learn about and remember a new place. In the test, mice explored a 5-feet-long enclosure where unique symbols denoted different locations along its white walls. A treat (sugar water) for mice was place at both ends of the track. The activity of specific neurons in the mouse hippocampus (the region of the brain where new memories are formed) known to encode for places, was measured while the mouse walked around.

The researcher noted that when a mouse was first put in the track, it was not certain about what to do and so moved left and right until it came across the treat. In these cases, when a mouse took notice of a wall symbol, single neurons were activated. But over several experiences with the track, the mouse became familiar with it and remembered the site of the treat. As it became more familiar, more and more neurons were synchronously activated by seeing each symbol on the wall. Basically, the mouse was recognizing its own location with respect to each unique symbol.

In order to investigate how memories fade over time, the researchers then withheld mice from the enclosure for up to 20 days. Upon coming back to the track after the sabbatical, mice that had formed strong memories encoded by higher numbers of neurons remembered the task promptly. The mouse’s memory of the track was clearly identifiable when analyzing the activity of large groups of neurons, in spite of some neurons showing different activity. Alternatively, using groups of neurons enables the brain to recall memories while having redundancy, even if some of the original neurons fall silent or are damaged.

Gonzalez clarifies, “Imagine you have a long and complicated story to tell. In order to preserve the story, you could tell it to five of your friends and then occasionally get together with all of them to re-tell the story and help each other fill in any gaps that an individual had forgotten. Additionally, each time you re-tell the story, you could bring new friends to learn and therefore help preserve it and strengthen the memory. In an analogous way, your own neurons help each other out to encode memories that will persist over time.”

While earlier theories about memory storage suggest that making a memory more stable requires the strengthening of the connections to an individual neuron, this study proposes that increasing the number of neurons encoding the same memory enables the memory to stay for longer. The study has great implications for designing future treatment that could boost the recruitment of a higher number of neurons to encode a memory, and could help prevent memory loss.