The Top 10 Fascinating Facts About Your Brain

1. Your brain is forever changing. The ability of the brain to respond to experience and physical change is called plasticity.
2. You have holes in your brain. There are four spaces in the brain called ventricles that protect the brain from extreme pressure, such as that caused by head trauma.
3. Your brain is the original 3-D. Your eyes transmit small, inverted two-dimensional images to your brain, and your brain fills in missing information and creates three-dimensional images.
4. Your working memory can only hold about five to nine “chunks” of information, and its typical duration is about thirty seconds.
5. The perception of pain is paradoxical. In certain circumstances your brain can actually block the perception of pain and allow you to continue with an action.
6. Everyone dreams, even those people who claim they don’t. Dreams are an attempt by your brain to make sense of the mass of information sent to it during REM sleep.
7. The frontal cortex displays the most prolonged development of all brain areas, not becoming mature until adolescence.
8. Attention is among the most sensitive of cognitive abilities. Difficulties with attention and concentration are some of the most common problems associated with disorders such as depression or anxiety.
9. Only a small percentage of all brain activity actually reaches conscious awareness.
10. Your memory is not a tape recorder. When you recall memories, your brain must actually re-create them. This re-creation is subject to outside influences (context, suggestion, emotional states, etc.) and can alter the memory of past events.