Let's Find Out - The Human Brain (part 3) | ASMR soft-spoke [science, facts]

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

The most complex single network in the universe... is you. Let's find out about ourselves as we explore the human brain. Thanks for watching. #ASMR

perspective is half purposely set up. I accidentally set it up and decided I thought it was cool because we're going to be talking about some facts about the brain, the mind, sleep, dreams today. Let's have fun with this. Let's learn a little bit about the brain, about the mind, that is certainly a part if not all created by the brain and

just give you guys something to relax to while we figure out a little bit more about the world than we knew hopefully before you put the video with any luck I'm not making you dumber in this book from

1987 mind you can't directly please show you the page and if even if I did it would be a mirror image speaking of which I guess finally my microphone will be on the right side that should be your right in this is your left with any luck right that was a nice segue into our first into our first phenomena about the brain. So few people who, a few friends of mine who are left-handed, apparently a lot more, many more people are right-handed than I realized. I thought it would be

more like 70, 30, right to left, dominant. But apparently the great majority, apparently it's closer to 95% of the population are right-handed, and it's been known for a while now that the left hemisphere of the right. So it's interesting that hemisphere is also, on average, responsible for things in your life pertaining to orderliness, predictable, things that you've already mapped out in your world, whether it's in you or external to you, or characteristics of behaviors of other people. And then the right hemisphere linked to your left arm, left hand, left half of the body generally.

The right hemisphere is generally, we all are fairly familiar with, associating with creativity, but it is also more generally associated with unexplored, unpredictable phenomena. So when we're exploring things that we haven't, when we're exploring novel phenomena, that we haven't yet come in contact with, we generally excite and use the right hemisphere of our brains. It's very interesting, so that's, I guess, explains why statistically most, the most creative of our population,

though not all of them, are left-handed. So the speech and language centers of the brain are in the right, creative hemisphere, which makes sense when you think about having to string together a series of words. Generally, themselves are probably stored in your longer-term memory, ordered in a certain way, in order for them to be uniquely strung together to create an original saying, sentence communication so there's

a fair degree of creativity that goes into stringing a series of words together to make a unique thought interestingly the majority of left-handers

the majority of left-handers also use the left hemisphere of the brain to communicate and control speech but the percentage appears to drop to about 70%. But about 15% of left-handers appear to actually use both sides of the brain

to control their speech. I'm actually going to show you some maps of the brain that show where different through an MRI machine and I just say scans. recent magnetic resonance imaging would be this book was written in 1987 and anyways these areas of the brain happen to light up undergoing these corresponding activities so let's show you real quick see if I can do this gracefully

we could see in the top resting with eyes closed it's pretty much the whole brain is lit up so that's interesting it doesn't say sleeping it just says resting so that must mean that

your brain is your no doubt your imagination is triggered quite a bit state looking at a moving object we see the top frontal lobe I guess no doubt

activating the vision, the visual centers. This is interesting, reading silently. So this, reading silently, right next to reading aloud. Then we have reading silently, there's much more sparse activity. And I wouldn't necessarily say less. But, so reading a lot. loud, it would appear that the active centers are much more interconnected. So I'm guessing that's the language centers connected up with the speech centers.

So yeah, reading aloud, I guess on top of the language in the speech centers, it would be activating the motor cortex, the motor areas associated with talking and speech physically moving your mouth and then down here we have we see listening to music at the bottom and then listening to words at the bottom right and these two definitely do not look drastically distinct but they're certainly different so I guess I guess it would probably matter if the words, if there were words in the music. But they certainly look, I'd say more, it's like more similar areas of the brain than they are different. That's interesting. So maybe that tells us that music communicates in a way more similar to our brain than we realize,

more similar to language in our brain at least that's how we because after all I guess we are pretty intimately linked to our brain more similar to language than we realize. You know I was just thinking maybe I meant to light these

these candles I have right here speaking of lighting up certain parts of the brain Maybe we can use that as a nice segue into lighting certain parts of this candle perspective. You guys really get an idea of, well, I guess it's just another layer of complexity in the image that you guys are seeing. Now the weight of the human brain, it triples between the birth and adulthood. I didn't realize that. reaching a final weight of about three pounds.

So three pounds on average for men, 2.9 on average for women. By the time a person's 50, the brain actually, though, shrinks very slightly. Losing about an ounce in weight, so that's one-sixteenth of a pound. Now there's no correlation between brain size and intelligence. A man's brain is usually slightly larger than a woman's, but in both sexes, because the women's body are generally smaller than the men's, the brain-sized to body weight is proportional.

There's actually two writers that all the opposite for the largest and smallest brain records. This was, for the largest, it was the writer, the Russian writer, I actually haven't heard of this guy before. That definitely means that there's no correlation between intelligence and size. So this is Russian author Ivan Turgenev, the 1800s, and his brain weighed four and a half pounds. Then the brain of a French writer, who I have heard of, interestingly enough, Anatol, France. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, weighed only two and a quarter pounds.

The brain is divided into two left, left, and right hemispheres. Each mirror images of the other. In most people, the right hemisphere correlates with control of the muscle and receives information from the left half of the body. In the left hemisphere monitors and controls the right half of the body like we talked about. And then going back to the right left-handed people distinction, in right-handed people, the majority, the left side of the brain, is usually concerned such skills as reading and writing

and talking. The right hemisphere deals with artistic activity and the workings of imagination. The same is true for left-handed people, but left-handers are somewhat more likely to have their functions actually reversed in terms of how they relate to the hemispheres.

And this one's always something I'm really fascinated about. I've mentioned it before and it deals with the number of connections within our brains. Our brains have 100 billion neurons and this is after, you know, of course this estimate isn't exactly accurate, but this is after I think we're born with something like four or five hundred billion neurons and after we've there's a famous phrase in neuropsychology that goes neurons that fire together wire together so after the first couple years of childhood development and the combining and and emergence of neural pathways that are defined or or help define actual regular activity of children,

you know, as they learn skills and develop conceptions, conceptual categories for reality. All those extra neurons, they're kind of like an unchiseled statue. There's a lot of surplus material, but because it's not directed, oriented, in any certain fashion, then they're really useless. They're not useful until they've been able to be wired together

into certain structures in the brain that the pulses to action can be defined by as these neural pathways fire, as they light up, as they activate, guess we might say and as they activate then you have definite or at least more definite than the effuse diffuse neurons that we were born with so as we develop more and more and and fortify um modes of behavior and activities then all these other neurons they get chiseled away and ultimately we have something like a structure that we might even call a personality that is developed out of this. And it takes 100 billion neurons, which are microscopic nerve cells. Each cell has a slender projection called an axon.

This axon links it through a fine connection called a synapse to other parts of the central nervous system. And some axons stretch the length of the entire spinal cord, which is about three feet. So you have some three-foot cells. These are single cells, mind you. There are three feet long in your body. making them of course the longest ones that we know about each neuron is also linked to neighboring neurons by up to 50,000 connections and these are called dendrites so so we have a neuron they have an axon and at the tip of those axons we have dendrites and think about so we have a hundred billion neurons Let's see, 100 billion neurons times 50,000. So, 100 billion would be, you know, thousands,

thousands, millions. So you have six zeros. We can do that with math. Six zeros for 100 billion. Two, three, four, five. No, sorry, nine. So 100 billion is a huge. number 100 billion we have 50,000 neurons for every single one of those 100 billion neurons

um dendrites sorry dendrites for every one of those neurons is that we uh so we can effectively just add a five at the end of that 100 billion and add a couple more zeros and we're gonna get we would get one trillion, trillion, billion, million manifestation of, or your mind, I should say. So when you think about now in awe of, you know, complexities, chemistry or physics in stars, in black holes, and really anything, I mean, there's the math that goes into modern chemistry and physics, not to mention biology. is astounding and just imagine imagine how much more complex you and I are something like a like a magnetic field the electric current induced we're certainly more and that's a very crude example very crude example of what goes on in our phones and what goes on in our heads make this look like a game of jenga

you know or tick-tac-toe so it's um I just love emphasizing that because when I learn that and I still haven't fully grasped exactly what that means and we literally very literally and I know that word gets

overused a lot these days but in its real sense we are literally the most complex things that we know about in the world so just keep that in mind the next time you're feeling down about yourself or uncertain about interacting with other people you're interacting with the most complex thing that we know about maybe in the universe right now and before you let that suck you out and make you anxious just remember that everybody else sees the exact same thing you to them are one of the most complex things in the world too and just because your complex doesn't mean that you aren't able to understand yourself just think about what what privileges

comes with that with being such a complex being so adaptive, dynamic, being so, so layered and complex, you're able to learn, you're able to explore, you're able to create, and that's a beautiful, if mysterious thing, you know? Life itself is fascinating, and we are at the pinnacle of the complexity. of this weird phenomenon we call life. So just remember that next time you're doubting your own competence and ability. You are ridiculously complex, and that means that although you can potentially be an obstacle to other people, you harbor within you for potential for novel.

and creativity than any other thing in the universe you are the source you are part of a species being human beings homo sapiens sapiens that is a wellspring I'm specifically adapted to look out into the world gather information adapt to it and turn it into a virtue, turn it into a tool to be able to not only navigate the world, but navigate ourselves, navigate each other. We don't give ourselves enough credit for our abilities, you know, our ability to socialize with other beings just as complex as we are. So, yeah, that's my little bit, my little optimism rant for the day. New information reaching the brain from the senses is stored, analyzed, and acted upon by means of electrochemical impulses,

passing from neuron to neuron through the dendritic connections that we talked about. but just how complex information is actually coded into these impulses or how it is translated back again is imperfectly understood but it is known that the brain remains active to some degree around the clock and that each day it triggers hundreds of millions of impulses this more than all the world's telephones, telephone systems put together in 1987. The thumb, though, okay, this is kind of jumping to a new fact, but the thumb is so important

in the human scheme of things that it has a special section, its own section in the brain, separate from the area that controls the fingers. so it'll be a good time to tap and there's actually a part of the brain called the motor homunculus and someone's mapped it out in the thumbs it's an accurate depiction of the human body

it's a picture of the human body drawn sizes of the objects the certain parts of the human body are proportional to how much of the that part of the brain is dedicated to that part of the body. So in other words, the picture has two huge thumbs. The back and midsection are very small

because we're not, we don't have a lot of densely concentrated nerve receptors, pain receptors, but on the tips of our fingers, on our tongue, Our tongue is huge in this diagram. Our entire head in general is very, very large in this picture. Our feet in our hands are also on average, very large. But in particular, our thumbs, we are all thumbs. It's so funny.

Maybe I'll edit that in to show you guys. But it's an interesting picture. of the human body and how our different areas are represented in our brain. Alright, so in the last little fact, I'll read. And finally, nerve impulses

to and from the brain. The actual impulses travel as fast as racing cars. They go about nerve impulses to and from the brain. The fastest impulses recorded and experiments in 1966 traveled at nearly 180 miles per hour. Nerve impulses do, they do move slightly more slowly in elderly people. They add up to about 150 miles per hour.

Fortunately, low down our thinking as we get older. That's still one-sixth. It's still only one-sixth. So that's less than... It's maybe 15% slower. But that certainly by any means doesn't make up. It doesn't define cognitive activity as a whole. But anyways, that's...

I'm going to leave it there. I thought that was pretty interesting. As most things I talk about on this channel, if you all sleep well, and I'll see you next time.