By: Brad Hankins
Consult Your Primary Care Provider Before Making Changes to Your Medications, Diet or Beginning/Changing an Exercise Program
In the next several columns we will explore brain health and those things we can do to keep our brain healthy. I would first like to write two words, so we don’t have to be afraid of them – dementia and Alzheimer’s. It is extremely unfortunate when individuals and families are touched by either, and both can be frightening to consider. However, there are choices we can make to help to improve the health of our brain, regardless of age.
Let’s start with a page from the brain owner’s manual:
- Our brains weigh approx. three pounds and are about 2% of total body weight. At the same time 15% of our blood flow goes to our brain (approx. 1.5 pints per minute), and our brains consume 25-30% of our daily calories.
- Fluid makes up approx. 75% of the brain, by volume.
- There are 170 billion brain cells making up 86 billion individual neurons (nerve cells).
- Your body creates 750 to 1500 new brain cells each day (about one per minute).
- The brain is approx. 60% fat, making the brain the fattest organ of the body.
- Most brain fat is used in myelin, which insulates each nerve from the others. This is the same as insulation on electrical wire prevents the inner metal part from touching other wires.
- There are approx. 180 separate and distinct areas in each hemisphere (half) of the brain.
- You are both left brained and right brained. Each hemisphere is separate but connected to the other. Each communicates with the other, sometimes directly and sometimes in consult.
- Our brain cells use a combination of electrical impulses and chemical reactions (dopamine, serotonin etc. – there are over 60 different brain chemicals) to communicate.
- Brain impulses travel at speeds up to 400 feet per second, or over 250 miles per hour.
- If all the blood vessels in our brain were connected end to end, they would be approx. 100,000 miles long (a distance almost halfway to the moon).
- The two main brain fuels are oxygen and sugar.
Our brains are a very complex and busy place.
This may help in a minute-a bit is the smallest unit of digital information, it is equal to answering a single question yes, or no. A byte is 8 bits of information, a gigabyte is one million bytes and an exabyte is one billion gigabytes.
Our brains processing speed (how quickly our brain can take in, interpret and respond to information) is a maximum of 120 bits per second. We typically reach this limit processing word recognition, interpreting speech, processing images and reading. When we are in conversation, we can usually process what the other person is saying at a rate of 60 bits per second – on a good day. This is why when two people are speaking to us at the same time it is difficult to understand, let alone retain, what both are saying – we have exceeded our maximum 120 bit per minute processing speed. Interestingly this is the same reason when driving you instinctively turn the music down when traffic gets heavy, and it suddenly starts raining – you have hit your maximum 120 bits per second and need to reduce information input to devote all available processing speed to not becoming a hood ornament on a Kenworth.
We take in a tremendous amount of information per day, and with each passing day our exposure to information increases. Each day we can process up to 3.4 gigabytes of information, or information equal to 100,000 words every 24 hours – though much of that information is in the form of TV, podcasts, TikTok videos, and scrolling through Facebook posts about kittens. And we live in a world of 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of available human-made information. Google alone contains hundreds of billions of webpages and has well over 100,000,000 gigabytes of directly searchable information.
In 1925 newspapers were the main source of information, a daily newspaper of the day contained an average of 25,000 total words. Only 19% of American homes owned a radio and the concept of national radio stations was still developing. Most information came from local, or regional, sources. Currently you can check the weather in Shanghai in less than a second and practically every news source on the planet is immediately available at the touch of a screen
We have the same brain function our grandparents had in 1925, with the same 120 bit maximum processing speed. But we are processing many times that amount of information in the same 24 hours. For those of us old enough to have lived from newspapers, radio and primitive TV to laptops, iPads and cellphones, our brains have made huge adaptations in the ability to process information. And all this information, along with the technology that supports it, adds to the difficulty of processing day-to-day activities. Like trying to open one of those thin, stuck together plastic bags every time you want to buy a tomato.
As we are limited to how much we can process, choosing what to process becomes important. There are times we are on auto pilot (have you driven to the store but can’t remember details of how you got there), but most of the time we are aware of the increasing input/stimulation around us. Focusing on this awareness, or at least occasionally checking in with yourself, and self-responding early to escalating input can go a long way in making your brain, and yourself much happier.
I would enjoy hearing about your fitness journey, please feel free to email me at hankinsb@ssymca.net.
Brad Hankins RN, CPT