1. Your brain uses less power than your refrigerator light

In a day, your brain uses the amount of energy contained in two large bananas — around 12 Watts of power. Although the brain is efficient, it’s an energy hog. At only 3pc of the body’s weight, it consumes 17pc of the body’s total energy, most in maintenance. The drain for thinking hard is barely noticeable.

2. Frequent jet lag can damage memory

Jet lag in repeated doses can be dangerous to your brain’s health. People who often cross many time zones can experience brain damage and memory problems. This probably results from the stress hormones released during jet lag that are known to damage the temporal lobe and memory. However, you probably don’t need to worry unless you work for an airline.

3. Why you can’t hear phone conversations in a noisy room

Talking on your mobile phone in a noisy place can be difficult. The phone makes the brain’s task harder by feeding sounds from the room you’re in through its circuitry and mixing them with the sound it gets from the other phone. This makes it a harder problem for your brain to solve because your friend’s transmitted voice and the room noise are tinny and mixed together in one source. Cover the mouthpiece and you’ll stop the mixing.

We will publish more fascinating brain facts next time.

Extracted from Welcome To Your Brain: The Science of Jet Lag, Love and other Curiosities of Life, (Rider Books, £12.99).

Research published by Grand Valley State University reports the conclusion that when it comes to brains, bigger is better.

Larger animals generally tend to have larger brains but part of the reason was assumed to be the need to control their larger bodies. But researchers found one other reason: larger animals also tend to be smarter.

The difference lies in cognitive ability related to environment. Domain-general cognitive ability allows species to adapt and deal with changes in the environment, whereas domain-specific skills are suited only to particular environments.

Larger animals may need to be smarter to control aspects of their environment, and because they generally live longer, they may have more to gain from being flexible and adaptable as the environment is more likely to change during their lifetimes.

Although the researchers concluded that it is not always necessary to adjust for the correlation between body size and brain size in comparing intelligence across species, they do allow that body size cannot always be dismissed as a factor - larger bodies may need larger brains to accomodate greater neural traffic. And although they do not assert that elephants or whales are smarter than humans or that men are more intelligent that women, in general, brain size seems to be linked with intelligence.

Bigger is Smarter!

Science fiction has long used the imagined futuristic ability to create and erase memory to build a plot. Total Recall, Paycheck, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are just a few movies using such a plot device. But new research at Brandeis University indicates that memory erasure may not be so far-fetched or impossible.

By manipulating a protein kinase called CaMKII, researchers say that memory storage can be induced and erased from the hippocampus. CaMKII has been termed a “memory molecule”. When CaMKII is chemically attacked, memory is erased.

Researchers cite the possible use of this discovery in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy but one has to wonder about the ethical uses of this ability to weaken synapses by attacking memory molecules, the ability to prevent or erase memory storage.

Read more: New Research Sheds Light On Memory By Erasing It

The BBC has an Internet survey on Brain Sex and if you’ve never taken it, you should go there and try it out. I remember doing this survey a year or so ago and I wasn’t surprised by the results so for me, anyway, it seemed accurate.

The data from the survey has been analyzed and research papers with key findings are being published in the current issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. You can read the BBC summaries of the articles at bbc.co.uk.

The survey had over 450,000 participants and 225,000 completed the survey. Some of the conclusions may be considered common knowledge, such as the finding that men rank good looks in a mate higher than women do. But some findings are intriguing. The survey results link spatial processing ability to sexual orientation.

You can take the Sex ID test here. Get a brain sex profile and find out if your brain is more male or more female. Have a ruler handy, because you will need to measure your fingers (really). It’s a revealing test that may help you understand why you think like you do.