brain on Air

Breathing is the bridge between the brain and the body.

Even though your brain makes up only about 2 percent of your body’s weight (about three pounds), it uses 20 to 30 percent of the calories you take in, as well as 20 percent or more of the oxygen and b...

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, the function of the brain was to keep the body from overheating. In The Parts of Animals, he noted that that the brain was a “compound of earth an...

A man with so large a brain must have something in it.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations….Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray par...

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos?

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting huma...

The human brain is truly the most sophisticated, elegant, biological piece of machinery ever known.

Because important things go in a case. You got a skull for your brain, a plastic sleeve for your comb, and a wallet for your money.

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount o...

Made up of a dozen billion microscopic nerve-cell units interconnected by millions upon millions of conducting nerve-threads weaving incredibly intricate patterns, the brain, as an object of research,...

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up and does not stop until you get into the office.

What happens in the brain when we are afraid? Remember the little red metal square on the school-room wall with a piece of glass that reads, “Break in case of fire”? Just as the school has a fire alar...

Our brains need to engage and make decisions again, instead of floating along the paths of least resistance.

An intimate acquaintance with some of the structural features of the human brain is thus seen to be not only necessary to the physician, but also to the psychologist, the educationalist, and the socia...

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicia...

As we begin the 21st century, the Hubble space telescope is providing us with information about as yet uncharted regions of the universe and the promise that we may learn something about the origin of...

The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. Its billions of nerve cells - called neurons - lie in a tangled web that displays cognitive powers far exceeding any of the silicon machines we have built to ...

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single p...

Why can’t our brains take something we intellectually know, something that seems easy, and process it into something we just get with our whole selves.

Social media addiction also changes our neurochemistry: our slumped posture produces cortisol; the backlit phone and blue light can suppress melatonin (needed for sleep); and a recent study with “hard...

The average adult brain consists of more than 10 billion neurons communicating with one another through more than 10 trillion synaptic connections. (Synaptic connections are the junctions or gaps betw...

If you look at the anatomy, the structure, the function, there's nothing in the universe that's more beautiful, that's more complex, than the human brain.

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same...

Neuroimaging has shown that as we age, our cognitive center of gravity shifts from the imaginative right brain to the logical left brain. At some point, most of us top living out of imagination and st...

In February 2011 human brainpower faced off against Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, in a battle of knowledge and processing speed on the popular TV show Jeopardy. Who would win? Ken Jennings and Brad Rut...

Most of us have spent some time wondering how our brain works. Brain scientists spend their entire lives pondering it, looking for a way to begin asking the question, How does the brain generate mind?...

Now, what is the heart? Neurologically speaking the “heart” is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the part of the brain right between your eyes and slightly back from your forehead. It is in this br...