5 Fun Facts About Your Amazing Brain

Although it occupies a scant 2 percent of your body, it sucks 20 percent of your energy — enough to light a 25-watt bulb. It's small enough to fit in your hands — or, preferably, snugly in your skull! Yet if its many creases, folds, and layers were spread out, it would take up more than three times that area.

Judith Horstman, author of The Scientific American Healthy Aging Brain: The Neuroscience of Making the Most of Your Mature Mind, dips into her book to serve up 5 more amazing facts about your brain, here.

Like a fingerprint, each individual's brain is unique. Your brain's connections and interconnections often overlap with other functions. It’s more like a comical Rube Goldberg contraption than the computer to which it’s so often compared. That’s probably because its many complex and diverse functions have evolved over time, piggybacked onto basic functions that intertwine in ways that are still not completely understood.

Your brain has more cells than there are stars in the Milky Way: 100 billion cells called neurons, six times that or more cells called glia, and an estimated 40 quadrillion connections. To reach those numbers, your fetal brain had to generate more than 500,000 cells per minute in the early stages of development.

Your brain is changing all the time. Scientists are discovering the brain makes new neurons in some areas, is constantly making and breaking networks and connections to meet new needs, and is fine-tuning gene activity – and does so into old age.

You're born with a DNA blueprint, but your brain determines what genes will be activated throughout your lifetime. You can greatly affect the outcome with what you eat, do, and even think.

Your brain will continue to develop and mature with you throughout your life, and it is always adapting. But most of your brain cells are as old as you are. In contrast to other cells in your body, they do not reproduce themselves (except in select areas.)

Your brain never sleeps. Much as a gardener prunes away spent blooms and branches, the brain prunes itself throughout your life, cutting off less-used connections and strengthening more useful ones to create stronger neural bonds. Literally, what you don’t use, you can lose. But, when you do learn something new, your brain will expand to make new connections.

Watch for more articles in our series from The Scientific American Healthy Aging Brain. By the end, you'll have all the tools you need to keep your brain healthy and working at top efficiency!

And check out Nova Science Now: How Does the Brain Work. This entertaining and informative video from PBS will give you insight into the tricks pickpockets and magicians use to fool your brain and show you how what once was science fiction is now becoming reality.