Brain Awareness Week: 4 Cool Things Your Brain Can Do
This year for brain awareness week, we’re sharing 4 mind-blowing facts about our favorite organ: the brain! Your brain is responsible for so much in your day-to-day life. Here are some amazing things you may not know about this hub of learning, thinking, and processing:
Your brain can process a virtually unlimited amount of new information.
The storage capacity of the human brain is pretty unfathomable. According to research, the brain consists of approximately 86 billion neurons. These neurons form connections every time you learn something or process through something, resulting in up to one quadrillion (1,000 trillion) possible connections.
To take this to a smaller scale, a piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand has up to 100,000 neurons and potentially 1 billion synapses (or connections).
Your brain works faster than your car!
The speed of the electrical impulse (communication) between neurons is up to 268 miles per hour! This high-speed handoff of information is what enables you to learn, think, and function in our fast-paced world.
If you feel like you or your child lags behind or that it takes ages for something to sink in, it could be a sign of slow processing speed. Learn more about how slow processing impacts life and learning here.
Almost half of a child’s energy goes to fueling the brain.
During peak development (like preschool to early school age), physical growth begins to slow. This is because a huge portion of the child’s energy is being devoted to cognitive growth and brain development. As you get older and hit growth spurts, puberty, and adulthood, more energy is redirected from brain development back to the body.
You can build new neurons and connections, even as an adult.
Neuroplasticity is the ability to form new neural connections that make memory, processing, and thinking easier. Even as an adult, your brain has the capacity to form new neurons and establish new connections!
This rewiring is why people with impairments in one sense often have heightened awareness in others. For example, blind individuals have stronger hearing and smell to compensate. According to research, this happens because the area of the brain that usually deals with vision rewires itself to process sound information.
This also means that you don’t have to settle for the way your brain works as being “as good as it gets.”
Your brain’s neuroplasticity is key to understanding how improvements in focus, learning, reading, memory, and processing can happen. At LearningRx, our brain training literally rewires connections in your brain to make these processes more efficient, at any age.
In fMRI scans, research about our programs has found new connectivity after brain training. This is great news for kids who struggle because it can make learning more efficient, but it also holds true for adults, TBI survivors, people facing memory loss, and more.
