Brains on the brain

Wellcome Collection’s latest enticing exhibition opens today, which has given us brains on the brain.

Over the next few weeks we’re running a short series on this blog highlighting some of our online materials related to this fascinating organ.

Let’s begin with a few facts about the brain:

• Our brains form a million new connections every second of our lives.
• The hippocampus – a brain region involved in spatial navigation – is bigger than normal in London taxi drivers.
• The adult brain contains around 100 billion neurons and even more support cells.
• Your brain uses less power than your refrigerator light – just 12 watts.
• There are no pain receptors in the brain, so brain surgery or injury can occur without causing pain (the scalp and the skull, however, are sensitive to pain).
• The total length of myelinated nerve fibres in the brain is between 150,000 and 180,000 km (enough to go around the Earth about four times!).
• Your brain accounts for just 3 per cent of your body’s weight, but consumes 17 per cent of your body’s total energy.

These facts are brought to you by our Big Picture Little Book of Fast Facts.

If that’s whetted your appetite, head over to Wellcome Collection, where you’ll find more on what humans have done to brains in the name of medical intervention, scientific enquiry, cultural meaning and technological change.

Among the delights are an interactive 360 degree brain made up of high-resolution pictures of an actual human brain.

Give your own brain a workout and grow a few brains cells (literally) by playing the fast-paced game Axon. Warning: it’s addictive.

Also addictive, Wellcome Collection’s carefully curated Tumblr of images of brains. They also have more traditional image galleries exploring the themes of the exhibition, including how we’ve measured and classified the brain, how scientists have mapped and modelled it, the tools used to cut and treat it and how samples are taken to help find the cure for neurological diseases.

If you’d like to find out more about the science and scientific history, there’s also a series of interesting free talks and events coming up, looking at different aspects of brain science and brain culture.

Finally, don’t forget to visit the exhibition itself, featuring over 150 artefacts including real brains, artworks, manuscripts, artefacts, videos and photography. Brains: The Mind as Matter is open until 17 June 2012.

Ask not what brains do to us, but what we have done to brains.