Your brain is an amazing organ. It produces enough electricity to power the light bulb. It is believed to run on one exaFLOP , which is said to be on the scale of "a billion billion calculations per second." Its capacity could be one petabyte or 500 billion printed pages of standard text. And as amazing as all that may seem, there are still a staggering number of things it can't do that you may not even realize.
10. Your brain doesn't sense humidity.
Imagine you're walking outside. The day is warm and slightly cloudy. You feel something cold and wet hit your face and realize it's raining. What exactly did you feel? The nerves in your flesh will register the pressure of the drop and the change in temperature. But what about the humidity?
Despite what our senses tell us, our brains are not capable of perceiving moisture. What we perceive as moisture is combination of sensations , including texture, pressure, temperature, and so on. When they occur together, our brains are able to identify them as wetness because, in our experience, that is what wetness feels like. It is an illusion based on our previous experiences. But you have no doubt had times when you felt something that seemed wet, and it turned out not to be, like a trick of the senses. It is all just your brain trying to process the sensations.
As it happens, our brains are bad at processing this sensation of wetness differently depending on where you are on the body, but you can at least estimate what you perceive as the level humidity .
9. You don't perceive black in the absence of light.
When you need to draw what you see when you close your eyes, you will use black. However, this is not necessarily what you actually see. The color you see is a shade of very dark gray. The Germans have a name for this - eigengrau It means "one's own gray" or "inner gray."
There are a few things that make it impossible for us to see black with our eyes closed, and they have to do with contrast. You need light to understand darkness. Without it, you settle for something less dark, that inner gray that plays behind your eyelids. There's also brain chemistry going on.
A protein called rhodopsin helps convert light signals into electrical signals in this brain. This is what allows your brain to make sense of what you see. The protein is activated by photons. Photons cause isomerization of rhodopsin, and this starts the process of "vision" as we understand it. But spontaneous isomerization also occurs in the absence of light, allowing us to see in a very limited way when there is no light at all. And this produces the internal gray.
8. Your brain can detect magnetic fields
The mystery of how birds manage to migrate, sometimes thousands of miles each year, can be attributed to their remarkable ability to follow the Earth's magnetic fields. Other animals, from sharks to flies, also have the ability to sense magnetic fields. The ability to do this is due to proteins called cryptochromes.
The weirdest thing about cryptochromes is that humans have them, too. Research shows that they are active in some people’s brains, and when exposed to magnetic fields, these proteins respond just like those in animals that can use them for navigation. So the human brain could theoretically sense changes in magnetic fields. But the problem is, your brain has no idea what to do with that information.
While research shows that your brain can do this, it does nothing with it There is no discernible influence on behavior, either conscious or unconscious, that we can determine.
7. When you're drunk, your brain can't form new memories.
Many people enjoy alcohol from time to time, and some people enjoy more than their fair share. This can become a problem if you drink so much that you can’t even remember what you did the night before. Drinking until you forget everything is generally considered bad. But that may not be what happens when you drink, at least not technically.
Drinking doesn't so much make you forget as it does prevent you from remembering. What's the difference? Forgetting implies that you had a memory to begin with. But alcohol impairs your brain's ability to form new memories. If you drink a significant amount, you can become intoxicated to the point of loss of consciousness, which means you did everything you did when you were drunk, but your brain couldn't store those memories. So you didn't do anything and you forgot, you just never made the memories.
When the blood alcohol content reaches 0.18–0.30, the hippocampus is impaired. This is significantly higher than what is generally considered the legal blood alcohol limit if you are stopped by the police, and is close to alcohol poisoning.
6. Your brain can't relax in unfamiliar places
If you've ever found yourself in a hotel room, or even a friend's house, and sleep has been as elusive as the mighty Bigfoot, you're not alone. Sleeping in unfamiliar places is tough for most people, and your brain is to blame. Well, half your brain, anyway.
Blame it on our ancient ancestors, who had to worry about predators and perhaps attacks from rival clans, but when we try to sleep in unfamiliar surroundings, our brains are less likely to relax. The right side of your brain will be better at shutting down and falling asleep, but left hemisphere, seems to remain alert. This same behavior can be seen in animals like dolphins, who literally can't fully fall asleep because they'd drown. You can't drown in a Motel 6, but your brain isn't sure, so it has to stay alert.
The phenomenon happens so often that it has its own name - First Night Effect . This causes your brain to be more alert to noise at night and wake you up more quickly if something happens. But this usually only happens for one night. Brain imaging techniques used to monitor how the brain works also show that after sleeping in the same place for a second night, many brains cool down and both sides can switch off and rest at the same time. However, some people take up to four days to fully rest in a new place.
5. Your brain reacts to physical and emotional pain the same way.
One of the worst feelings in the world is having your heart broken. Have you ever burned your hand on a stove? That hurts, too. Can you reasonably tell which one hurts more? Or, even harder, can you tell how they hurt differently? If you’re finding it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between your understanding of physical pain and emotional pain, don’t worry. Your brain doesn’t know the difference either.
It's not just a nice metaphor when they say that emotional pain hurts like real physical pain. Research using MRI showed that the human brain responds to emotional pain in the same way it does to physical pain. This means that, physiologically, you are in the same pain, and your brain does not differentiate between the two. Worse, emotional pain actually makes you stupid. When you deal with mental pain, you immediately take a hit to your mental faculties, and your IQ may drop approximately 25%.
4. Your brain can't map heights.
If you've ever been on a plane, you know that at some point the captain usually calls over the intercom to tell you your cruising altitude. You may never have thought about it before, but next time you're up there, so what if you can guess your altitude before they tell you. Chances are, you can't, because our brains are really bad at representing altitude.
A study of rats' brains as they climbed found that part of their brain , which is responsible for representing space and distance, barely registers when an animal is simply moving upward. The cells that measure distance simply don't know how high an animal is climbing because our brains seem to understand how things work in three dimensions , in particular the ability to climb vertically, differently than it understands working on the ground. It's a bit like having two different maps for navigation. Your brain is pretty good at reading horizontal, not vertical.
3. Your brain can't function properly on social media.
Did you find a link to this on social media? We have good news and bad news. The good news is that you are being entertained and educated at the same time. Isn't that great? The bad news is that social media is ruining your brain.
According to research, the average person spends more than two and a half hours on social media every day. This changes the way your brain processes information and makes you a victim of what's called variable ratio reinforcement, where you constantly expect to see new information and feel rewarded when you do. This makes it hard for you to focus on one thing for long periods of time and makes you easily distracted.
People who use social media heavily perform worse on cognitive tests. It takes them a real effort to focus on a single task. Worse, your brain reacts to social media almost like it does to drugs. You crave it, and it can become addicted .
2. Your brain can't surprise itself.
You've no doubt heard that you can't tickle yourself. If you haven't, try it right now. For most of us, it's a non-starter. You just can't do it, even if someone else tickling you leaves you a writhing, laughing mess on the floor. But that's not necessarily because your brain is a dumbass.
Let's start with the fact that tickling is actually a defense mechanism. The sensation and our visceral, twitching, wriggling response are born out of our reaction to things like spiders or other weird little critters crawling on us. Likewise, it's potentially a response to aggression. Our ancestors may have laughed, even when they were uncomfortable, to show that they weren't interested in fighting. But we can't do that to ourselves because our brains, so to speak, sees that we are approaching .
Surprise is the key to tickling. If a person tickles you, you don't know where their fingers will go next. The whole experience is awkward, and the laughter is usually not that joyful. But your cerebellum knows where your hands go to tickle yourself, so the feeling of surprise can't take hold.
1. Your brain can't multitask.
Some people pride themselves on their ability to multitask. If you’ve been in the workforce for the last 30 years or so, you’ve probably seen most job postings say they want people who can multitask. That’s just how we do things these days. Except it’s not. This may come as a shock to you, especially if you think you’re good at multitasking, but neuroscience says you’re not. The human brain is bad at multitasking.
No one discounts the sense of accomplishment you can get from doing three tasks in a row quickly, but the fact is that you're better off doing each task individually. And honestly, when do you think you're multitasking, right? Neuroscientists say most of us switch between tasks You don't do two things at once, you quickly switch between two things. The reason is that your brain is not designed to focus on more than one thing at a time.
For example, neurobiologists suggest trying write an email while talking on the phone You may think you can do it, but try it for real. Notice if you can speak in complete, coherent sentences, listen to the other person, and type a readable email at the same time. In reality, most of us would talk, then type, then talk. Your brain can’t separate these two communication tasks at once. In fact, the more tasks you try to do at once, even with task switching, the worse your overall performance will be.
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