This day was created to encourage everyone to expand and exercise their brain and use more of its potential capacity. There are many different ways to train your mind and improve your cognitive skills such as reading, word puzzles, number games, brain teasers, trivia games, riddles and word games. Learning something new is another practice that is a benefit to everyone’s brain on National Train Your Brain Day as well as any other day. Without further ado lets check out some really astonishing facts!
1. A piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses, all communicating with each other.
2. All brain cells are not alike. There are as many as 10,000 specific types of neurons in the brain.
3. Your brain needs a constant supply of oxygen. As little as five minutes without oxygen can cause some brain cells to die, leading to severe brain damage.
4. Babies have big heads to hold rapidly growing brains. A 2-year-old’s brain is 80% of adult size.
5. The typical brain comprises about 2% of the body’s total weight, but uses 20% of its total energy and oxygen intake.
6. Your brain is 73% water. It takes only 2% dehydration to affect your attention, memory and other cognitive skills.
7. Ninety minutes of sweating can temporarily shrink the brain more than one year of aging does.
8. Your brain weighs about three pounds. Sixty percent of the dry weight is fat, making the brain the fattiest organ in the body.
9. Twenty-five percent of the body’s cholesterol resides within the brain. Cholesterol is an integral part of every brain cell. Without adequate cholesterol, brain cells die.
10. No one knows for sure, but the latest estimate is that our brains contain roughly 86 billion brain cells.
11. Each neuron can transmit 1,000 nerve impulses per second and make as many as tens of thousands of synaptic contacts with other neurons.
12. Since the Victorian era, average IQs have gone down 1.6 points per decade for a total of 13.35 points.
13. Technology has forced most of us to be prodigious multitaskers. But your brain can’t learn or concentrate on two things at once. What it can do is quickly toggle back and forth between tasks. But doing so decreases your attention span, ability to learn, short-term memory, and overall mental performance.
14. Unexpectedly, millennials (aged 18 to 34) are more forgetful than baby boomers. They are more likely to forget what day it is or where they put their keys than their parents!
15. Attention spans are getting shorter. In 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. Now, it’s 8 seconds. That’s shorter than the 9-second attention span of the average goldfish.
16. Brain cells cannibalize themselves as a last ditch source of energy to ward off starvation. So, in very real ways, dieting, especially low-fat diets, can force your brain to eat itself.
17. Over 140 proteins in the brain are negatively impacted by exposure to electromagnetic frequencies, the kind emitted by your cell phone and other electronic devices.
18. Relying on GPS to navigate destroys your innate sense of direction, a skill that took our ancestors thousands of years to develop and hone. When areas of the brain involved in navigation are no longer used, those neural connections fade away via a process known as synaptic pruning.
19. Nootropics are substances that can make you more focused, motivated, positive, and productive.
20. If you were drinking alcohol and don’t remember what you did last night, it’s not because you forgot. While you are drunk, your brain is incapable of forming memories.
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