Dale’s Daily Data: Human Brain

How many bones do you think make up the human head?  First you have to remember the skull alone is made up of 8 bones….then there’s the jaw – the upper and lower…..the cheek bones…the bones that hold the eyes in place....the tiny bones in the inner ear.  In all our head is made up of 29 bones.

Inside the skull is that brain of ours.  That mass of what sometimes looks like noodles in our head weighs about 3 pounds.  The average adult male brain is 49 ounces, but the size of your brain doesn’t always indicate intelligence or memory capacity.  The heaviest human brain on record was just over 81 ounces….more than 5 pounds.  Einstein’s brain weighed 43 ounces, meaning Einstein’s brain was smaller than average.

An elephant’s brain weighs about 11 pounds.  The brain of a whale comes in at about 22 pounds.

The brain uses up more energy than any other organ – using up about 20 percent of the food we take in.  And one quarter of the brain is used to control our sight.  We actually see with our brain with our eyes basically a camera.

Even with all the advances in computer technology they say we’re decades away from creating a computer that comes close to the memory capacity of the human brain.  That’s just memory and doesn’t even consider all the things the brain does to think, reason, create and show emotion. 

SOURCE:  How Stuff Works