If you have a traumatic brain injury that injures basically an entire brain hemisphere or are born with a birth-defect that leaves you with one functional brain hemisphere, the brain will transfer almost all necessary functions to the remaining hemisphere, even though the two hemispheres are set up to do entirely different things.
There is speculation that the more texture/folds/twisty bits you have on the surface of your brain, the smarter you are.
IQ is, in some ways, a social construct rather than a biological function, which is why you can't give an IQ test to an African-American child.
If you scan someone's brain you can tell things about brain-related abilities and disabilities and substance abuse based on the energy levels in different parts of the brain.
Some kinds of meditation increase brain activity and there are parts of sleep where the brain is very active which we think might involve processing short-term memory into long term.
It is possible to store information in longterm memory without it having passed through short term memory.
A really cool one- you can learn information, even if the part of the brain that would normally process the information has been injured in a way that disallows learning through it and without being aware of learning it. IIRC, they did one study where they showed a person with a brain injury that blinded them (or, really destroyed a particular set of visual processing centers) a picture. The person could not consciously see the picture and was not told what the picture was, but when asked what it was, they knew.
Gay men often have parts of their brains that work in ways that are more similar to women's brains than to straight men's.
The brain processes music in a lot of the same ways it processes math.
People tend to learn better while listening to complex music (specifically Mozart IIRC) than simple music.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 04:29 am (UTC)Lets see, cool things about the brain:
If you have a traumatic brain injury that injures basically an entire brain hemisphere or are born with a birth-defect that leaves you with one functional brain hemisphere, the brain will transfer almost all necessary functions to the remaining hemisphere, even though the two hemispheres are set up to do entirely different things.
There is speculation that the more texture/folds/twisty bits you have on the surface of your brain, the smarter you are.
IQ is, in some ways, a social construct rather than a biological function, which is why you can't give an IQ test to an African-American child.
If you scan someone's brain you can tell things about brain-related abilities and disabilities and substance abuse based on the energy levels in different parts of the brain.
Some kinds of meditation increase brain activity and there are parts of sleep where the brain is very active which we think might involve processing short-term memory into long term.
It is possible to store information in longterm memory without it having passed through short term memory.
A really cool one- you can learn information, even if the part of the brain that would normally process the information has been injured in a way that disallows learning through it and without being aware of learning it. IIRC, they did one study where they showed a person with a brain injury that blinded them (or, really destroyed a particular set of visual processing centers) a picture. The person could not consciously see the picture and was not told what the picture was, but when asked what it was, they knew.
Gay men often have parts of their brains that work in ways that are more similar to women's brains than to straight men's.
The brain processes music in a lot of the same ways it processes math.
People tend to learn better while listening to complex music (specifically Mozart IIRC) than simple music.
Random factoids, I haz them. :P