Question: what have you found out about the brain so far?

James Munro answered on 6 Mar 2019:

Hey there, cheers for the question 🙂

The brain controls everything that we can do, sense, feel – so there is a lot to find out about it! Some cool and important stuff:

1. There is a part of the brain which makes us see familiar things all over the place. Like faces in rocks or landscapes or familiar bodies or places even when they aren’t around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area This area can be damaged and then people stop even being able to recognise faces at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

2. Your brain can have a lot of damage and a lot of parts missing due to problems in the womb or during childhood – but still work fine. One participant of mine had a huge hole in her brain that wasn’t supposed to be there, but it had never bothered her in her 60 years of life. There was nothing she couldn’t do. This has happened a few times http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141216-can-you-live-with-half-a-brain

3. The brain is “plastic”. Which means it changes over time and in response to things happening. If you learn how to play piano, your brain will physically change to be better for playing piano. If you live somewhere cold, if you do a lot of painful difficult work, if you have children – your brain changes in response to these things. As you grow older, your brain grows less plastic – and so it is harder to learn new things. This is why young children can easily learn many languages but it is very hard to do as an older adult.

4. People can, and have, used computers to learn how the brain processes things you see. Resulting in a really cool video where computers try to guess what videos a participant is watching – by reading the participants’ brain activity. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

Lots of interesting stuff about the brain – it is very complex 🙂