You carry around a mass of wrinkly material in your head that controls every single thing you will ever do. From enabling you to think, learn, create, and feel emotions to controlling every blink, breath, and heartbeat – this fantastic control centre is your brain.

Your brain is faster and more powerful than a supercomputer

Your kitten is on the kitchen counter. She’s about to step onto a hot stove. You have only seconds to act. Accessing the signals coming from your eyes, your brain quickly calculates when, where, and at what speed you will need to dive to intercept her. Then it orders your muscles to do so. Your timing is perfect and she’s safe. No computer can come close to your brain’s awesome ability to download, process and react to the flood of information coming from your eyes, ears and other sensory organs.

Your brain generates enough electricity to power a light bulb

Your brain contains about 100 billion microscopic cells called neurons – so many it would take you over 3,000 years to count them all. Whenever you dream, laugh, think, see, or move, it’s because tiny chemical and electrical signals are racing between these neurons along billions of tiny neuron highways. Believe it or not, the activity in your brain never stops. Countless messages zip around inside it every second like a supercharged pinball machine. Your neurons create and send more messages than all the phones in the entire world. And while a single neuron generates only a tiny amount of electricity, all your neurons together can generate enough electricity to power a low-wattage bulb.

Neurons send information to your brain at more than 241km per hour

A bee lands on your bare foot. Sensory neurons in your skin relay this information to your spinal cord and brain at a speed of more than 241km per hour. Your brain then uses motor neurons to transmit the message back through your spinal cord to your foot to shake the bee off quickly. Motor neurons can relay this information at more than 322km per hour.

When you learn, you change the structure of your brain

Riding a bike seems impossible at first. But soon you master it. How? As you practise, your brain sends “bike riding” messages along certain pathways of neurons over and over, forming new connections. In fact, the structure of your brain changes every time you learn, as well as whenever you have a new thought or memory.

Exercise helps make you smarter

It is a well known fact that any exercise that makes your heart beat faster, like running or playing football, is great for your body and can even help improve your mood. But scientists have recently learned that for a period of time after you’ve

exercised, your body produces a chemical that makes your brain more alert to learning. So if you’re stuck on a homework problem, go out and play a game of football or run around with your friends, then try the problem again. You just might dis-cover that you’re able to solve it.

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DID YOU KNOW?

• The brain is the heaviest organ in your body.

• Your brain requires 20% of the entire body’s blood flow.

• The human brain contains 400 miles of blood vessels.

• The front of the human brain is larger than any other

animal’s, even the dinosaur’s!

• Your brain is wrapped in three layers of tissue and floats in a special shock-proof fluid to stop it from getting bumped on the inside of your skull as your body moves around.

• Your brain is more powerful, more complex and cleverer than any computer ever built.

• It is constantly dealing with hundreds of messages from the world around you and from your body and telling your body what to do.

• It gets the messages from your senses – seeing, hearing,

tasting, smelling, touching and moving.

• If you get too tired or don’t eat enough food, your brain can’t do this as well as usual.

• Your brain keeps on growing until you are about 20 years old.

• A dog’s brain is 19 times smaller than a human adult brain; an elephant’s brain four to five times bigger than yours.

• An adult bottle-nosed dolphin’s brain is about the size of a human adult’s brain.

http://www.cyh.com/HealthTopics/HealthTopicDetailsKids

http://www.copingskills4kids.net/amazing-brain-facts