Welcome to your Brain

“I think, therefore I am.”

Congratulations; You are a human being! A social primate; born with the ability to develop speech, walk on two feet and the largest brain (brain to body ratio) in all of the primate species. Although having a big brain and intelligence are 2 totally different things but I am sure you already know that...just look around!

Your brain’s fused with a “cerebral cortex” that is loaded with 16 billion neurons, greater than any other species on earth! And since you are not jumping up & down, singing hallelujah, let me explain what that means;

Think of neurons as a “cellular” app, used by the brain to send and receive messages to or from your body. Over all your brain has 86 billion neurons which are rapidly passing information; ranging from your muscle movements to what you see, smell or taste, etc.

Now: if neurons are a messaging service the cerebral cortex is a very sophisticated smartphone that controls most of your existence. It is home to your consciousness, in-charge of your thinking process, decision making, how you process language, handles “sensory information” among other sophisticated operations.

And that is just the top part of your brain; there are 2 more beneath the cortex. The human brain is basically divided into 3 parts,

Cerebral Cortex (Top)

Limbic System (Mid)

Brainstem (Base/Bottom)

To make matters simple: imagine you have a monkey, a goat and a lizard living inside your head and voalá you got your brain all figured out.

Cortex is the monkey or primate side of your brain, very evolved, deals in sophisticated matters.

Next is the Limbic system or the goat inside of your brain that deals in basic mammalian functions such as love, sex, anxiety, happiness, fear, et al. It is the store room for our memories. Hunger, motivation, learning and reward system are all part it. It is also responsible for creating threat alerts.

Brainstem is the lizard living at the base of our brain and it deals with most primitive reptilian functions such as breathing, sleeping, regulating of the heart rate, regulating of the body temperature, bodily functions, eating, blood pressure management, reflexes and consciousness and survival, etc.

What’s more is that this is not a hierarchical design meaning each piece has the ability to overlap the other two. A good example of this would be that when you are watching a horror movie and your cortex gets so involved that it fires signals to the limbic system which in response alerts the brainstem to make the heart beat faster even though there is not actual threat to your existence or when you are emotionally charged on something your cortex can not think critically about the matter at hand.

That is a lot of processing for such a small unit considering that an adult brain only weighs about 3 pounds but when you look at the energy consumption chart for it, it all makes sense to you.

Recommended (daily) energy intake for an adult human is 2000 calories per day and out of those 2000 calories; 500 calories or 25% of that energy total is consumed by the brain only. For a child that cost is doubled.

I know what you are thinking and the answer is a resounding no! you cannot get thinner by overworking your brain; if anything your brain is the one that is keeping you from losing weight because to make sure that your body has enough energy your brain uses a hormone called ‘Leptin’ that inspects your body more ferociously than a desi aunty but in reverse; as Leptin’s job is to make sure that you don’t lose fat. So the moment ‘Leptin’ senses that your body is losing fat it immediately fires a warning signal to your brain and in return your brain makes you feel hungry so that the lost fat can be regained!

Eating does keep the energy flow constant but in purely evolutionary terms having such a large brain with high energy demand would have been existential threat for any other species so how come human beings were able to pull that off?

Because we have cracked the code to get instant energy while our animal counterparts spend most of the day eating and digesting their food. We discovered the art of ‘cooking’ which made it possible for our species to thrive in such a spectacular fashion because cooked food is soft and easily digestible meaning we can eat more in less time therefore are able absorb more energy in a short span.

It is as if the human brain knew about the energy drain and came up with a solution and what a solution it is; quick and potent so much so that we are left with plenty of time to indulge in other activities thus the rapid growth in human progress.

From the discovery of fire to the knowledge of stem cells to the editing of human genomes, human brain is only beginning to unveil its true power and pretty soon it will help us conquer new frontiers in human evolution!