Amazing Facts About Brain Page 4 of 7

Amazing Facts 31# 

Your brain is constantly lying to you when you have your eyes open because it cannot deal with every single detail that you’re looking at. Your occipital lobe is constantly joining the dots with what it presumes is there based on small fragments of what it really sees.
 

Amazing Facts 32# 

Similarly, your brain doesn’t record memories like video, as it would be easy to assume. It takes snapshots of the more important bits and then when you recall the event it guesses what happened in between based on prior experience and generalizing.
 

Amazing Facts 33# 

Your brain finds it very easy to create false memories largely because of the above and the fact that it spends so much time guessing what’s happening.
 

When scientists exposed people to Photoshopped images of themselves at various events years prior, they were soon able to explain what they were doing and recall the event with clarity even though they were never there.
 

There will be events you blindly swear happened the way you remember, but never actually did. A sobering thought and one to remind yourself when you are about to get into a heated argument about how your spouse made a complete fool of himself after too many glasses of wine and fell on the Christmas cake at your parents.
 

I never did that! It’s a false memory my wife created to explain frosting on my nose and a hand print on the cake.
 

Amazing Facts 34# 

Your peripheral vision improves at night, which is why airline pilots are taught to use their peripheral vision when looking for traffic.
 

Amazing Facts 35# 

Your brain is fairly poor at distinguishing between what’s really happening and what you are merely imagining. Which is why horror films scare people and porn films, er…ahem, well you know what I mean.
 

It also partly explains why visualization works so well because it primes and trains the brain for future events without even having to leave the comfort of your own bed if you don’t wish to.

Amazing Facts 36# 

Your eyes are constantly moving even if that movement is usually imperceptible to you. So you may wonder why the images you stare at are not jiggling slightly too. The answer is, your smart brain realizes what is happening and uses other objects in your visual field as reference points and keeps everything locked together and seemingly as one stable image.
 

However, if I threw you in a pitch black room with only a spot of light on one wall, you’d soon be claiming that it was moving. Without any other reference points your brain is no longer compensating and your natural eye movement creates the illusion that the light is moving when in reality it is static.
 

Amazing Facts 37# 

You may (or indeed you may not) know that you need to blink to clear away dust particles and spread lubricating fluids across your eyeballs to keep them functioning properly. But why on earth doesn’t the world go black for about the one tenth of a second it takes you to blink?
 

This is similar to the fact that your brain makes up pictures from tiny fragments of information as previously discussed. Only this time your brain is clever enough to ignore the blink and maintain the image of what you were looking at prior to your eyelids closing.
 

Amazing Facts 38# 

Your brain is very poor at concentrating for long periods of time and needs to clear it’s head so to speak about every 90 minutes or so.
 

Which is why if you’re delivering training and you want to maximize results, you should steer clear of immersion training and allow people to take lots of mini breaks rather than one long break for lunch as is often the case.
 

Amazing Facts 39# 

The reason why some Chinese born people struggle to pronounce words like ‘fried’ is not because they can’t be bothered to learn them, as I ignorantly and embarrassingly believed when I was younger. It’s because no similar pronunciation is needed in the Chinese language.
 

Therefore, if they are not exposed to the English language before around the age of 3, that part of the brain is allocated to other purposes and thus their ability to form the word correctly is massively inhibited. It can be done, but it is very difficult, so don’t judge them.

Amazing Facts 40# 

You spend roughly one-third of your life asleep. No human can go without it for more than a few days, which is why sleep deprivation is a weapon of choice for armies the globe over when trying to ‘break’ soldiers wanting to enter the special services.
 

But even though you spend so much time asleep and it has been the subject of thousands of scientific studies, we still don’t know a fat lot about it. We do know that it’s the time when your brain does a lot of its necessary maintenance work, including the production of chemicals needed to get you through the following day.

Also, several theories point to sleep as a state vital to memory and learning. It may help ingrain memories into long-term storage, and it also may simply give us some time off from our mental waking activities.