What did you think about when you saw the name of this article? Did you click on it because you already know the answer and wanted to see if we got it right? Or maybe because you never actually wondered about this yourself and it made you curious? Or do you think about this often and haven’t come up with an answer on your own?

Maybe you took a step back and then, based on the subject matter, thought about why you thought anything at all. How is it that your brain is allowing you to understand what we’re saying to you right now and then form opinions about it? What is it in your brain that makes you think or understand anything?

Despite the fact that neuroscience is a 20th-century discipline and psychology dates back to the 1870s, we still know very little about certain parts of the brain and how they function. That doesn’t mean we know nothing, though, which is a good thing. We’re constantly learning, constantly progressing, and one day we may fully understand all the subtle intricacies of the human mind. But for now, do we know how thoughts and consciousness are formed? Let’s have a look.

The Basic Science

Let’s start with some fundamentals. How does your brain do anything? Neurons. Neurons are the basic building blocks that make your brain do everything from ensuring you keep breathing to creating new mathematical formulas if that’s something you do. Neurons make it all happen. 

Neurons are nerve cells and they group together in neural tracts and send signals to one another. They receive sensory input from outside of the brain, which could be anything from signals in your stomach about food you’re digesting to smells in the air, music you’re hearing, a movie you’re watching or a cold breeze you feel on your neck. 

The neurons send electrical signals between each other and also throughout your nervous system, controlling your entire body in response to the sensory input they receive. Some of it is totally out of your control, like the way your intestines contract as food is digested or the way your heart beats. Some of it is all up to you, like deciding if you want to go for a walk or just veg on the sofa. But how your neurons work controls it all. 

To manage everything your brain needs to control, you have between 80 and 100 billion neurons. These are connected by synapses of which you have 500 trillion. Electrical impulses are formed in the neuron thanks to positive ions flowing across the cell membrane. Any given neuron is permeable to both sodium ions and potassium ions, but the flow of potassium out is larger than the leak of sodium in, which allows for a negative inner charge until the neuron actually fires and the sodium channels open. Then these ions are exchanged thanks to action potential. Sodium rushes in and the neuron is depolarized. Potassium channels open and the potassium rushes out. A little spark is formed and your neuron can send a signal to the next in line. Now imagine it happening millions of times along the axons that connect your neurons.

When your neurons send impulses, they create neurotransmitters. These cause other neurons to fire. As the neurotransmitters spread, hundreds and then thousands of neurons will fire, and this is essentially how a thought is formed. 

So, in simple terms, stimulus from outside the brain sends a nerve signal to the brain. That causes the neuron to fire. The neuron produces neurotransmitters that make a chain reaction across many neurons, thought forms as a result. This happens in a fraction of a second, up to about half a second. 

Of course, your brain has many sections that govern many different functions, but we’re not getting into deep neuroscience here, just how the thing works in the first place. With that in mind, let’s look a little closer at what it does now that we know how it does it. 

What Your Brain Does

One thing to remember about those firing neurons in your brain will form patterns for you. If you do things repeatedly, the same way, your brain will create a neural pathway that actually strengthens as you continue to do and react the same way. That can, in part, explain why people get into routines and habits. Your brain is quite literally wired to do things a certain way if you allow it to happen. That’s also why learning to do something a new way once you’ve adapted to a different way can be difficult. Your brain has established it should be done one way and you’re trying to write a new pattern for it. 

Learning things makes the connections between neurons, and these neural pathways, stronger. You have reinforced the thought, an idea, a behavior, whatever it is. It is now something you know. The more you do it, the stronger it gets, the better you are at it. That is why repetition and practice are often essential to learning. 

Your brain weighs about three pounds and is made of both gray matter and white matter. The gray matter is on the outside and it allows you to process and interpret the information that you receive from all the external stimuli and sensory data in the world. The white matter is inside, and that sends information to different parts of your brain and throughout your nervous system so you can do things and react to what you’re experiencing.

How does your brain decide what to do, and when, and where? That’s an anatomy question.

Brainatomy!

There are multiple parts to your brain, but three main parts comprise the whole thing. The front of your brain is called the cerebrum. That’s where you find the cerebral cortex. This is a full 80% of your brain, so most of what you’re doing happens here. The cerebrum is where you interpret external stimuli like things you see and hear. It’s also where you do your learning, your reasoning, speaking, and where emotions are controlled.

Next up is the cerebellum. This little guy is in the back of your brain, just above the brainstem. Do you have any motor skills whatsoever? Can you stand upright without falling down? Thank your cerebellum for that. It handles balance, coordination, and your fine motor skills.

Speaking of your brainstem, that’s the last part. There are several sections in your brain stem, and the whole part is chiefly concerned with the more automatic functions of your body. Things like chewing and blinking are controlled in your brain stem, as well as breathing, sleeping, and your heart rate.

But wait, you might say. What about your frontal lobe? Or your occipital lobe? Those are in there too, and they are part of the cerebrum. Your brain has two hemispheres and four main lobes. The frontal lobe, which is obviously located at the front, controls things like personality, speaking, decision-making, and, for whatever reason, your ability to smell.

In the middle, you’ll find the parietal lobes that aid in spatial understanding, your sense of touch and pain, object identification, and understanding speech.

At the back of the brain, you’ll find your occipital lobes and those help you with seeing things and understanding visual stimuli. Understanding movement, color, and shape all happens in the occipital lobes.

Last but not least is your temporal lobes. These help with short-term memory, smell again, facial recognition, and emotional awareness.

There are also a number of other structures in your brain, including the amygdala, the hippocampus, the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus, the prefrontal cortex, and so on. As you can see, it’s a real mixed bag when it comes to what part of your brain does what. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of organizational structure going on there, so the whole thing needs to work together to have a fully functional mind. 

So maybe now we have a basic idea of how thoughts are formed in a brain, but what about consciousness? That’s not a reaction to external stimuli. Where does the you that exist in your brain come from?

Consciousness

We’ve got good news and bad news when it comes to explaining consciousness. The good news is, if you’re experiencing any of what we’re saying right now, you are conscious. The bad news is that’s about all science can tell you about your consciousness.

Something in the way that all your neurons and synapses connect throughout your entire brain creates your conscious experience. But what does that even mean? We can say fairly certainly that consciousness is a product of your brain. If you undergo anesthesia, your consciousness actually disappears for a short time. You’re not asleep, you’re not dreaming, and there’s no sense of yourself anymore because anesthesia shuts off nearly all the electrical activity in your brain. 

If you want a specific answer about how the inner workings of your brain allow consciousness to form, then you’re going to have to wait for a while. We don’t have an answer to that yet.

We can describe some of the dimensions of consciousness, what needs to happen for consciousness to be a thing. That includes the ability to have thoughts and feelings and be aware of them, some degree of wakefulness, and some degree of sensory organization that allows us to group concepts and perceptions together in an understandable way.

All of those things are more philosophical than biological, however. There’s a little crossover, but the ability to have thoughts and feelings isn’t really a scientific concept that can be explained in the same way as sodium and potassium ions moving in and out of neurons in your brain. Some have argued that your consciousness can’t actually be a biological process and that biology only represents the consciousness in the way a frown may represent sadness. It shows the emotion, but it is not the felt emotion, just like patterns in your brain may show consciousness but are not consciousness itself. 

MRIs and EEGs show that there is more activity in your thalamus and its connections through your brain when you are awake than asleep. We know something is happening in there, but not what or how. Sorry if that’s disappointing. 

What We Don’t Know

The fact is even neuroscientists can’t explain to you with a lot of detail how a brain works because there are so many things they don’t know. Those trillions of synapses we mentioned earlier? Each one is home to 100,000 molecular switches. Each of those is full of protein molecules that transmit information between themselves.

Given that studying thought and consciousness requires investigating a living brain and not damaging it while studying it, you can see how it would be almost impossible to fully map a conscious mind when you’re dealing with such ungainly numbers and such sensitive material.

We have a general understanding of how you can learn something, but not how your brain processes the information. In order to fully understand the human brain, we probably have to map it. So far, only a handful of organisms have had their brains fully mapped. It took four years to make a basic map of a mouse brain and a human brain has 1,100 times as many neurons. A team of scientists around the world have been collaborating on the project for years now and many millions of dollars have been spent, but we’re only a fraction of the way through the job.

One of the big problems with understanding how a brain works and even mapping it is that your brain and my brain are not the same brain. Neural pathways are formed differently, and information is processed differently. There are people out there who have severe brain damage, have even lost portions of their brain, whose brains are able to adapt and alter function. So even a map of the brain can’t explain everything about how a human mind works because it’s very subjective.

Neuroscientists have written extensively about many things we don’t know. For instance, the number of neurons is a ballpark number. We don’t know exactly how many a brain has, and it’s probably safe to assume that your brain and my brain have different numbers of neurons because neurogenesis exists and that can create neurons, while others can be destroyed.

We don’t know why drinking alcohol makes you feel relaxed. We don’t even know exactly how Tylenol works in your brain. We’re not sure why the left side of your brain is linked to the right side of your body, and vice versa. We don’t even know why we dream.

While we are learning more and more about the biology of the brain, the fact is there’s just a lot about what it can do and why that we can only guess at.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The human brain is amazing. In the words of neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, it’s a “three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand,” but it can “contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.” As it’s the most complex organ in our bodies, you can bet there’s no shortage of strange stories about the human brain.

10 Brains On eBay

Here’s a story with all the makings of a Gothic novel, complete with a mental hospital, human organs, and a ghoulish grave robber named David Charles.

Charles didn’t actually dig up any coffins, but he did break into the Indiana Medical History Museum on several occasions. From the 1840s right up to the 1990s, the museum was the site of the Central State Hospital, a psychiatric ward that performed its fair share of autopsies. After the bodies were cut up, the brains were jarred and locked away in a warehouse—a warehouse Charles later slipped into repeatedly.

After pilfering six jars of human tissue, Charles unloaded his goods to an eBay fence who sold them to a San Diego man for $600. The buyer liked “to collect odd things.” He also had a code of ethics. While he didn’t mind breaking federal law by buying human organs, and while he didn’t care about violating eBay policies on body parts, he did have problems with buying stolen property. Neither Charles nor his eBay middleman had the brains to remove the museum labels from the jars.

Figuring something crooked was going on, the San Diego buyer notified authorities. After tracking down the eBay seller, Indianapolis police officers set up a sting operation. The plan was for Charles, who’d recently snatched 60 more brains, to meet up with his eBay buddy at a local Dairy Queen. And on December 16, cops swarmed the restaurant parking lot, successfully bringing down the Indiana Igor.

9 The Cordless Drill Skull Operation

Marian Dolishny was dying. Thanks to a fair-sized tumor, he was suffering epileptic seizures, and if he didn’t do something about it soon, he’d go blind. Unfortunately for Dolishny, he couldn’t just visit the local hospital and schedule an operation. It was 2007, Dolishny lived in Ukraine, and due to a labyrinthine bureaucracy and massive underfunding, the healthcare system was a mess. No one could remove his tumor, and things were looking grim when suddenly an elderly British superhero showed up to save the day.

One of the UK’s best neurosurgeons, Henry Marsh had been visiting Ukraine at least twice a year since the early ‘90s. After meeting people with massive growths on their heads, Marsh realized he couldn’t fly back home and forget what he’d seen. So he sent disused supplies from his hospital in Tooting to Ukrainian doctors. Even better, he started offering his services free of charge.

That’s how Marsh and Dolishny met. But just because the Ukrainian had a great surgeon didn’t mean the operation was going to be easy. Marsh lacked access to the state-of-the-art equipment required for such procedures. However, the best doctors are like musicians—they’re talented, passionate, and can improvise on the fly. Marsh went to a local store and bought a $67 cordless power drill. He then operated with a gadget you keep in your toolbox.

What’s even crazier is Dolishny was awake for the whole thing. No qualified anesthetists were around, so Marsh just used a local anesthetic. And since Dolishny was awake, Marsh talked to him the entire time, making sure he wasn’t screwing up the man’s brain.

Before Marsh could finish the procedure, the drill’s battery died. Where a lesser surgeon would’ve panicked, Marsh kept on working, finishing up with his gloved hands and saving Dolishny’s life.

8 Strange Stories Of Ancient Brains

Your brain is 60 percent fat, and thanks to all that blubber, it’s the first organ to melt away after you die. That’s why archaeologists find so many skulls but so few brains. Most of them liquefied long before we could dig them up.

But every so often, scientists discover a brain dating back several thousand years. For example, the some of the oldest brain tissue ever discovered, around 8,000 years old, was found in eastern Florida, preserved under thick layers of peat. But while they’re not as old as their New World counterparts, the ancient brains of Europe carry much more interesting stories.

Our first macabre tale is the story of the Heslington Brain, the oldest known brain in Great Britain. In 2008, the University of York was expanding its campus when someone stumbled over several pits dating back to the Iron Age. After prodding around, archaeologists found one hole containing a skull, a jaw, and two neck vertebrae belonging to the same deceased Brit. When the skull was opened, scientists found the yellowy, shrunken remains of a 2,500-year-old brain. The muddy environment had kept it safe from decay. Marks on the vertebrae indicate that the body’s owner had been hanged and beheaded, possibly as part of a ritualistic murder.

Only slightly less morbid is the tale of the 4,000-year-old Turkish brain found in the Bronze Age settlement of Seyitomer Hoyuk. This brain looks like a charred log someone pulled out of a bonfire. That’s probably because it belonged to an unfortunate Turk who was minding his or her own business when an earthquake wrecked the entire village, bringing down a rain of rubble. Then, a fire broke out, incinerating everything and boiling said brain in its own juices. But while a bubbling brain sounds disgusting, this rapid evaporation of liquid coupled with nutrient-rich soil and elimination of oxygen via the flames ensured this charbroiled organ survived for thousands of years.

7 Unlocking Lenin’s Brain

Vladimir Lenin was a prolific writer and a serious philosopher. He also successfully overthrew a government and installed himself as unquestioned dictator. But was he a genius? Soviet scientists certainly thought so.

After the Premier died in 1924, Russian researchers were itching to cut open his skull and study his brain. They wanted to show the world Lenin was one of the smartest men on the planet. So after removing the brain, they plunked it in a jar of formaldehyde and stuck it in the V.I. Lenin Institute while they searched for the right expert to examine the organ. Two years later, they decided Oskar Vogt was the man for the job. The only problem was Vogt was German, and the Soviets didn’t want Lenin’s brain leaving Moscow.

In a typical Soviet compromise, officials gave Vogt one little sample to take back home. If he wanted to see the rest of the brain, he had to come to Russia. So for the next several years, Vogt visited the Moscow Brain Institute, but some Soviets weren’t too happy with this foreigner fondling their comrade’s cerebrum. Even worse, Vogt was telling people Lenin’s brain resembled a criminal’s.

Ticked off, the Soviets planned to fly to Berlin and take back the sliver of brain they’d lent the man, but Adolf Hitler fired Vogt from his position before the Russians could get their sample back. Nobody knows what happened to that little piece of Vladimir’s brain.

The Soviets cut the rest up into tiny chunks and dyed the pieces different colors. After the fall of the USSR, Russian scientists released a paper detailing the results of their nearly 70-year-long study. They had found nothing interesting at all.

6 The Woman Who Remembers Everything

Can you remember where you were on a randomly selected date 30 years ago? Say, the afternoon of September 20, 1985? Assuming you were even alive then, chances are good you’re drawing a blank, but Jill Price remembers that day perfectly. She was wearing a big hat and eating garlic chicken with her dad at one of her favorite restaurants. And if you picked some other random day, she could do the same exact same thing because Jill Price remembers everything.

Jill has a rare condition called hyperthymestic syndrome, which gives her a super-powered memory. While scientists are still trying to understand Jill’s mind, they believe her elephantine memory has something do with several areas of her brain that are three times bigger than average.

Thanks to her special brain, Jill can remember most everything that happened between her 9th and 15th birthday. And after that? She couldn’t forget anything if she tried. But strangely, if you asked her to memorize a poem, she probably couldn’t do it. Jill’s semantic memory isn’t all that strong, but her episodic memory, the part that remembers personal events and emotions, is perfect. And that’s actually a big problem.

In addition to remembering cool facts, Jill remembers every terrible event that’s ever happened to her as though it happened yesterday. That’s especially hard when Jill thinks about loved ones who’ve passed away or things people did years ago. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance,” she once said. “It’s like an endless chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

5 How Hugo Rewired A Man’s Brain

Photo credit: Paramount Pictures

Imagine the world as a flat, 2-D panel. There is no depth perception here. When pouring a glass of water and looking from above, you wouldn’t know it was full until the water spilled over. Trees would be nothing more than flat patterns blending into the background. This is the world Bruce Bridgeman lived in for 67 years until Martin Scorsese changed his life.

Bridgeman is a neuroscientist at the University of California, and until 2012, he was one of the 5–10 percent of the population suffering from stereoblindness, the inability to see three-dimensionally. In Bridgeman’s case, his impairment was caused by alternating exotropic strabismus. In other words, his eyes wandered around independently. Since he could only focus one eyeball at a time, he could never see out both eyes at once, eliminating all depth perception.

Then in 2012, everything changed. Bridgeman and his wife went to see Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 3-D. Even though it wouldn’t do him any good, Bridgeman bought the glasses and settled in for the picture. And once the film started, images popped out of the screen. Suddenly, everything was vivid and alive. Objects and people actually stood out from the background.

What was even more amazing is when Bridgeman went outside, he could still see in 3-D. The lampposts were no longer part of the background, and a tree was suddenly a “big three-dimensional sculpture.”

Scientists think Bridgeman always had the ability to see 3-D, but his brain just needed a wake-up call. As he stared at the screen for 128 minutes, his eyes focused on the movie, and suddenly his visual cortex just clicked.

Obviously, the 3-D movie cure doesn’t work for everyone. Some need corrective surgery, some spend hours in therapy, and others will never see the world in its full glory.

4 The Man Who Could Only Say One Syllable

Born in 1809, Louis Victor Leborgne struggled with epilepsy for years before things got even worse. At the age of 30, Leborgne lost the ability to speak. He could say just one syllable: “tan.” If you asked for his name, he’d say, “Tan tan.” If you asked him his favorite food, he’d say, “Tan, tan.” If you asked him the time, he’d say “Tan tan,” but he’d show you the correct time using his fingers. Louis Leborgne wasn’t stupid. He just couldn’t talk.

Unable to communicate, Leborgne checked in to a Parisian hospital, where he spent the next 21 years of his life. He morphed into a rather disagreeable person. He’d monosyllabically argue with staff and even steal on occasion. If Leborgne got especially angry, he could toss around a few swear words, though he could never curse when calm and composed.

Things got worse when his right arm and leg suddenly became paralyzed. Frustrated, Leborgne stayed in bed for seven years, and in 1861, he developed a horrible case of gangrene in his right side. Hoping to save Leborgne, the hospital brought in surgeon Paul Broca. The operation came too late, and Lebornge died on April 17, aged 51. However, his brain still had an important part to play in the world of neuroscience.

After examining Leborgne’s brain, Broca discovered a nasty lesion in the frontal area of the left hemisphere, a region later dubbed Broca’s area. After performing additional biopsies on similar patients, the doctor knew he was on to something big. For a while, scientists had been debating whether individual parts of the brain controlled specific functions. Now, Broca had proof that the front left hemisphere was responsible for language.

It also seemed the area was divided into multiple regions serving different functions, like language production and language comprehension. That explained why Leborgne could understand as many words as anyone else though he could only pronounce one.

Broca was right on the money, and his discovery revolutionized neurology. Leborgne’s brain now floats in a jar at the Musee Dupuytren in Paris, where anyone can come and visit it.

3 Brain Teeth And Brain Feet

Early in 2014, a four-month-old Maryland baby made headlines thanks to a rather unusual brain tumor. During an operation, surgeons found the baby had a craniopharyngioma, a growth created by the same cells that make our teeth. There were actual teeth growing in the baby’s brain. Doctors safely removed the toothy tumor, but this wasn’t the first case of its kind.

In 2008, Colorado doctors discovered Tiffinie Esquibel’s unborn baby Sam was suffering from a brain tumor. After inducing labor, the doctors took Sam into surgery, and what happened next sounds like a scene from a horror movie. When Dr. Paul Grabb cut open the tumor, a human foot popped out of Sam’s head. When the surgeons got over their shock, they dug a little deeper and actually found a hand and even a thigh.

Most doctors believe Sam was suffering from a teratoma, a tumor that often produces creepy body parts in places they don’t belong. As awful as that sounds, it’s way more comforting than the other theory doctors considered. A few suspected Sam might have a condition known as fetus in fetu, meaning he might have absorbed a twin in the womb, and his sibling was feeding off Sam like a human parasite.

2 The Man Who Loves Johnny Cash

“Mr. B” is a 59-year-old Dutchman who’s battled severe OCD for 40 years. Desperate for a cure, he agreed to try deep brain stimulation, a treatment involving surgical implants that zap the brain with electric currents.

Just as Mr. B had hoped, the shock therapy worked, greatly reducing his OCD, depression, and anxiety. However, the treatment had a really weird side effect. It turned him into the world’s biggest Johnny Cash fan. Before the surgery, Mr. B was a casual music listener who liked Dutch music, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. But after the treatment, Mr. B bought every Johnny Cash CD and DVD he could get his hands on. He won’t listen to anything else.

Scientists know the implants are responsible because every time their batteries start to die, Mr. B stops listening to his Johnny Cash albums. Yet as soon as doctors recharge the implants, he starts walking the line again, devoting himself solely to the Man in Black.

1 The Family That Can’t Fall Asleep

Italian physician Ignazio Roiter married into an old Venetian family, but unbeknownst to the good doctor, there was something horrifying about the clan’s history. Roiter’s first glimpse of the familial terror came in 1973, when his wife’s aunt developed an inexplicable sickness. All of a sudden, she couldn’t fall asleep. Soon, she was stuck in an agonizing limbo between unconsciousness and waking life. Completely exhausted but unable to rest, she lost the ability to walk and gave up on conversation until she died a year later.

In 1979, another aunt died of the same mysterious disease. Suddenly, someone remembered an old grandfather who’d passed away under similar circumstances. Curious, Roiter scoured records at the local church and nearby mental asylum. After finding multiple instances of relatives dying sleepless deaths, he was convinced a genetic disease was at work. And when an uncle named Silvano died of fatigue in 1984, Roiter got a chance to find out for sure.

Roiter took the man’s brain to two American specialists. After analyzing the organ, Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti found the brain was full of tiny holes. According to a second doctor named Stanley Prusiner, a mutant gene had activated a group of misinformed proteins called prions. These rogue molecules took on virus characteristics and started infecting other proteins, turning the brain into a war zone and shutting down important bodily functions like sleep.

There’s no cure for fatal familial insomnia. If that mutant gene activates the abnormal proteins, the carrier is doomed to a sleepless haze. As of 2010, scientists have found at least 40 families battling this illness. Until scientists do cure the disorder, people like Roiter’s relatives will never rest—not until that final big sleep.

Nolan Moore would dance and be merry, his life would be a ding-a-derry, if he only had a brain. If you want, you can follow/friend him on Facebook or send him an email.

In Western countries, there’s been an explosion in neurological diseases—including early-onset dementia—that can’t be explained by longer life spans. It turns out that some brain disorders have such bizarre symptoms that they’re sometimes mistaken for psychiatric conditions.

10Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis

For many patients, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis—a recently discovered autoimmune disease that causes the brain to swell—initially presents psychiatric symptoms such as hallucinations, violent outbursts, and delusions. Patients appear to be possessed by demons, and most of them will develop seizures and involuntary movements within a few days.

But the neurological symptoms may be subtle and easy to miss. Dr. Souhel Najjar, an anti-NMDA expert, believes that as many as 90 percent of these cases have been misdiagnosed. “There could be people in comas right now, or people stuck in psych wards, that have this disease and aren’t being treated properly,” said Emily Gavigan—an anti-NMDA patient—to CBS Eyewitness News.

One 24-year-old woman, Susannah Cahalan, spent over $1 million in hospital care with top doctors, but they repeatedly misdiagnosed her condition. She had seizures and hallucinations—grunting like an animal, she would kick and punch people. She thought newscasters were discussing her on TV. Then Dr. Najjar entered the scene and asked her to draw a clock face. When she drew all the numbers on one side, Dr. Najjar knew she had inflammation on the right side of her brain. Susannah was treated just in time to save her from a coma and death.

Although Susannah recovered with no brain damage, not everyone is so lucky. Even with treatment, approximately 7 percent of patients die, and others are left with mild to severe brain damage. Anti-NMDA can be treated with immunotherapy, but there’s no cure—only remission. A relapse requires more treatment.

Anti-NMDA has spurred Dr. Najjar to investigate other presumed psychiatric illnesses—such as bipolar disease, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia—to see if they, too, are actually physical illnesses caused by inflammation of the brain.

9Othello Syndrome

Othello syndrome (OS) is named after the Shakespearean character Othello, who killed his wife, Desdemona, because he believed that she was having an affair. OS patients develop the same stubborn delusions of suspicion and jealousy toward their spouses and constantly accuse them of infidelity. Some patients even have hallucinations of their spouse having sex with someone else.

OS usually begins around age 68, with about 77 percent of patients having a neurological disease affecting one of the brain’s frontal lobes—usually the right one. Sometimes, OS is brought on by the use of dopamine therapy for Parkinson’s disease. If that’s the cause, then reducing or stopping the medication may alleviate the symptoms of OS.

In Lewy body dementia (LBD), the symptoms of OS may continue (or even start) after the death of a spouse. LBD includes Parkinson’s disease and dementia caused by protein deposits—called Lewy bodies—in the nerve cells of your brain.

One 42-year-old man, who was being treated with dopamine agonists for Parkinson’s, began to insist on having frequent sex with his wife. Accusing her of infidelity, he obsessively stared at his driveway because he was convinced that a fictional lover was going to pick her up and have sex with her somewhere else. He lost thousands of dollars to sudden gambling impulses and couldn’t control his spending habit, either.

Also like Othello, OS patients can become dangerously violent. Men with OS have tried to strangle their wives or start fights with neighborhood men suspected of being their wives’ lovers.

8Sensory Desynchronization

“PH”—a retired pilot in his sixties—was the first confirmed patient with sensory desynchronization, where a person hears voices before people speak. For PH, life is like watching a movie with the sound and picture out of sync. He even hears his own voice before he feels his mouth move. Brain scans revealed one lesion in his midbrain and another in his brain stem. Both of these parts are associated with hearing, movement, and timing.

Scientists believe our brains process sight and sound at different rates to compensate for the different speeds at which light and sound travel. For most of us, our brains do the work when syncing voices with lip movement. But for PH, there’s now a quarter-second delay between hearing a voice and seeing someone’s mouth move. To sync them up, scientists played clips of people whose voice sounded 210 milliseconds before their lips moved.

No one knows how the human brain is able to unify our perceptions of sight and sound. But it does mean that each of us has more than one clock in our brain. If these clocks don’t work together correctly, the soundtrack to our lives may go out of sync with our visual reality.

7Ecstatic Epileptic Seizures

An ecstatic epileptic seizure—or ecstatic aura if it occurs in the first moments of a seizure—was described by the famous epileptic novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky: “I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life . . . I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give 10 or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”

A 53-year-old female teacher described her ecstatic seizure by saying, “The feeling was almost out of this world. This led to a feeling of complete serenity, total peace, no worries; it felt beautiful, everything was great . . . Maybe the closest sensation that I know would be an orgasm, but what I felt was not at all sexual . . . it was almost religious.” She went on to say that she no longer fears death and sees the world more vibrantly than she did before.

Some scientists believe ecstatic seizures explain what happens during near-death experiences. No one knows for sure what’s going on there, but researchers do know that ecstatic seizures only happen to about 1–2 percent of temporal lobe epilepsy patients. All these patients report a heightened sense of well-being and enhanced self-awareness. Some also report holding on to a moment in time, feeling serene and blissful yet sometimes overloaded by the intensity of what’s happening.

Often, these seizures start in one of the brain’s temporal lobes. Some neurologists believe that the insular cortex—which is under the temporal lobe—is really where the activity occurs. Unlike the temporal lobes, the anterior insula is supposed to be linked to our feelings—both good and bad.

6Misophonia

Sufferers of misophonia fly into rages at small noises that most of us disregard or don’t notice: gum chewing, soup slurping, and soft footsteps, among others. Their hearts pound, their fists clench, and their bodies seem to explode with uncontrollable fury or anxiety. Unlike hyperacusis patients—who perceive all sounds as unbearably loud—misophonia patients are fine with loud noises. It’s the soft ones they can’t stand.

Misophonia usually starts during late childhood or in the early teenage years. Over time, the condition gets worse and patients acquire more trigger sounds—even breathing can set some people off. Sufferers don’t outgrow the condition. As a patient named Adah Siganoff said, “It’s all about the reaction. The rage. The anger. Not being able to stop it. For people with this disorder, the sound is like 200 people pulling their fingernails down a chalkboard at the same time. It’s that same intensity and it’s very overwhelming.”

Many of these patients have been misdiagnosed with psychiatric conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder. But some doctors are beginning to recognize misophonia as a neurological disease that may be caused by faulty brain wiring in the area that causes emotions. Many other doctors still don’t believe in misophonia—for now, treatment options are limited and largely ineffective. Most patients have to cope as best they can by eating alone or by releasing tension through screaming. Some people use earplugs to block out the sounds.

5Developmental Topographical Disorientation

Imagine getting lost every day—even in your own home—and you may have some idea how Sharon Roseman of Littleton, Colorado feels. Now in her sixties, Sharon has struggled with developmental topographical disorientation (DTD) since she was five years old. DTD is a rare neurological illness that leaves a person unable to orient herself or navigate anywhere. When Sharon couldn’t recognize her house as a little girl, her mother warned, “Don’t tell anybody because they’ll say you’re a witch and they’ll burn you.”

Sharon complied, not even telling her husband about her condition. It got so bad that she would have trouble finding her children at night when they cried. When she drives a car, curved streets and angles leave her disorientated as do oceans, lakes, and swimming pools. As Sharon described the experience, “It’s almost as if somebody picks up the entire world, turns it, and sets it back down.”

When Sharon first sought medical help at age 29, she saw a psychologist. But he couldn’t treat her disorientation. She was later told she might have a brain tumor or possibly epilepsy. This, too, turned out to be false. Then she met Guiseppe Iaria, a neuroscience professor at the University of Calgary. Dr. Iaria had published the first paper about DTD in 2008, and thus he knew exactly what Sharon was going through.

Doctors aren’t sure exactly what happens to a DTD patient’s brain. Scans don’t reveal any atrophied or shriveled areas. But Jeffrey Taube, a professor from Dartmouth College, believes that the mapping processes in different areas of a DTD brain aren’t communicating with each other properly, and that their internal compasses have short-circuited.

Currently, there’s no cure for DTD. Until then, Sharon is simply relieved that she can finally explain her condition to others without being called crazy or a witch.

4Musical Hallucinations

A woman simply identified as “Sylvia” heard a piano playing outside her house one day. But there was no piano—Sylvia was actually experiencing a musical hallucination. These sound real enough to convince the patient that a live band or choir is in an adjoining room. Over time, Sylvia’s hallucinations became almost constant, featuring long melodies from classical composers like Rachmaninoff.

Psychiatric conditions like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia can cause musical hallucinations. But in most cases, it’s not psychosis. It’s simply an older person with a hearing impairment whose brain incorrectly predicts what they’re hearing. At least, that’s the theory of doctors who’ve studied Sylvia and other patients like her.

Sylvia eventually discovered that listening to real music would briefly stop the hallucinations. By imaging her brain both when live music was playing and when it was not, doctors were able to identify which regions showed stronger activity as the hallucinations got louder. Based on these studies, doctors now believe that our brains only hear one actual note or chord. It will then predict the following notes based on past experience. If our brains predict incorrectly, the next actual sound will cause our brains to make an entirely new prediction to minimize errors.

When someone has a hearing impairment, the brain receives fewer sound inputs and makes more prediction errors. As the mistakes increase in number, they begin to feel and sound very real to the patient. Doctors believe patients are most likely to hallucinate music because it’s organized and thus easier for the brain to predict than random noise.

3Huntington’s Disease

Caused by a mutation in the Huntingtin gene, Huntington’s disease (HD) is a rare inherited disorder that breaks down nerve cells in the brain over time, affecting a patient’s behavior and movement. Musician Woody Guthrie died of the disease after being misdiagnosed for years. So far, there is no cure.

Some people, like Katharine Moser, get tested young to find out if they have the genetic defect that causes HD—which usually doesn’t manifest until middle age. Sadly, many HD patients are afraid to admit they have the disease—both because they don’t want to face it and because they’re afraid of discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. As Ms. Moser’s mother said, “Nobody has compassion. People look at you like you’re strange, and ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ”

Katharine Moser had seen the ravages of the disease on her grandfather when she was younger. His body jerked involuntarily, and he would have violent outbursts. One time, he entered the kitchen without any clothes on except for the underwear on his head.

In its early stages, HD symptoms vary among patients. Generally, though, the younger the patient when symptoms begin, the faster HD progresses. Mood swings are an early symptom. The HD sufferer may become depressed, irritable, apathetic, or angry. HD may also impact a person’s memory, judgment, and learning ability. Over time, their intellect will be increasingly affected.

For other patients, the first signs are uncontrollable movements in the face, feet, fingers, or trunk. There may also be balance or clumsiness problems. Over time, basic functions such as eating, speaking, and walking will decline. For now, death is the inevitable outcome.

2Frontotemporal Dementia

While Alzheimer’s begins with memory loss that later gives way to behavioral problems, Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) does just the opposite. By first killing nerve cells in the frontal lobes, FTD begins with behavioral problems. Then, as the damage spreads around the brain, the patient’s memory fades. Over time, Alzheimer’s and FTD present almost exactly the same way.

FTD often strikes victims 45–65 years old—younger than Alzheimer’s usually does. The behavioral variant known as bvFTD has early symptoms that mimic psychiatric conditions the most. Physically, FTD results in atrophy of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. But as with all forms of dementia, it robs its victims of their lives, loves, and dignity. As one family member said, “Being a caregiver in this disease is a grieving process while the person is still alive.”

Barbara Whitmarsh, a former scientist at the National Institutes of Health, was married for three decades and had six children with her husband, John. Eventually, though, John noticed severe changes in his wife that were caused by her FTD. He said, “Her ability to feel empathy, her personality, it just disappeared over a period of time.” She also gained 15 kilograms (30 lb) in one year.

With bvFTD, patients may develop abnormal appetites for sweets. They’re also prone to violent outbursts, loss of inhibitions, and poor emotional judgment. They can become hyperactive, hypersexual, and impulsive. But perhaps the hardest symptom for families to cope with is the patient’s loss of feeling for the people around them. What’s worse—FTD patients typically don’t recognize the changes in their behavior.

Barbara Whitmarsh no longer recognizes her family members and speaks only rarely. She’s been confined to a locked nursing home, where she never stops moving.

1McLeod Syndrome

Caused by an inherited mutation in the XK gene, McLeod syndrome is a neurological disease that typically starts in midlife and only affects about 150 men in the world. Half the patients have seizures, while other symptoms include muscle weakness and atrophy, involuntary jerking of the legs and arms, grimacing, and vocalizations like grunting and mental deterioration.

But it’s the odd changes in behavior that may cause doctors to mistake McLeod syndrome for a psychiatric disease. Some of the early symptoms are depression, anxiety, and severe emotional instability—including a lack of self-restraint. There is no cure, but treatments can address symptoms.

According to Southern Methodist University researchers, McLeod syndrome may have been the real reason King Henry VIII of England beheaded two of his six wives. Initially, Henry VIII was strong, athletic, and generous. At around 40 years of age, he began to experience weakness and atrophy in his legs that eventually caused immobility. He also descended into psychotic paranoia, ultimately beheading his wives.

McLeod syndrome is specific to the Kell blood group, which may also explain the difficult pregnancies of Henry VIII’s wives and mistresses. They were pregnant with at least 11 of his children, but only four lived past infancy. If Henry VIII carried the Kell antigen in his blood, and his women didn’t, then they would only be able to have a healthy first child before losing every one thereafter.

+Alien Hand Syndrome

The corpus callosum is a band of nerve fibers that lets the right and left hemispheres of the brain communicate with each other. Sometimes, a surgeon must cut the callosum of an epilepsy patient’s brain in order to help stop seizures. Most patients recover normally from this procedure. But some end up with the two halves of their brain operating independently of one another. Quite possibly, they’ll end up waging war on each other, like an alien has taken control of one side of the body. This, appropriately enough, is known as alien hand syndrome (AHS).

Nobel prize-winning scientist Roger Sperry filmed an AHS patient arranging blocks to match a pattern on a picture. The patient’s left hand—which was controlled by the right half of the brain—did a good job. The right hand, though, couldn’t do it. What’s more—when the left hand attempted to help the right, they started fighting with each other like a couple of squabbling kids.

Karen Byrne’s epilepsy was cured by cutting her corpus callosum. But one day, her doctor noticed her left hand was opening her shirt buttons with Karen being completely unaware of it. After rebuttoning her shirt with her right hand, her left hand began to undress her again.

Sometimes, an alien hand will punch or slap the patient. Or, if a patient’s legs decide to go in different directions, that person will end up walking around in circles as the two brain halves engage in a power struggle. Luckily, Karen’s doctors have finally found a way to control her symptoms with medication.

Thanks to years of studying the insides of people every chance we get, we have a pretty good grasp on the functions of almost all of our body parts. The brain, however, seems to get more mysterious the more we try to study it. Because of its complexity, it’s no surprise that studying it (as well as the nervous system) is a full-fledged scientific field on its own, namely neuroscience.

As our scientific tools get better and we get a deeper insight into the inner workings of the most important part of the body, we realize that it’s capable of much more than we previously thought. Here are ten of the most mind-blowing things you had no idea the human brain can do.

10 Sense Earth’s Magnetic Field

The ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field has been extensively found and studied among animals. From birds to marine mammals to insects, many of them use the field to navigate, though this ability has always been assumed to be absent in human beings. After all, if we had that, why did we bother with the whole navigation thing in the past?

As it turns out, we might just have it, though not to the level of other animals. In a recent study, researchers put 84 participants in a Faraday cage, which is just a fancy name for a box without any electromagnetic disturbance. They created an artificial magnetic field and gradually changed its orientation and then observed the reaction in the brain. To their surprise, there was a definite reaction in the sections of the brain that deal with sensory stimuli.^[1]

The participants couldn’t consciously feel anything, and the reaction was limited to changes in magnetic orientation that would be found in nature. (The brain didn’t react when the magnetic field pointed upward.) It suggests that this possible sense only works in response to the Earth’s magnetic field and isn’t an all-purpose magnetic sensor.

9 Natural Alarm Clock

We all know someone who claims to have a natural alarm clock that wakes them up exactly when they need to. “I don’t need an alarm; I am an alarm,” they’d say casually, before you proceed to shut them down with research on how that’s not possible. If you actually look into it, though, you’d realize that they aren’t kidding. The natural body alarm clock is quite real and is as good—if not better—than any alarm money can buy.

Provided that you have a regular sleeping schedule you stick to, as most of us who have jobs do, the inbuilt alarm clock of the body is quite effective at waking you up before the stipulated time. As per research, it works due to stress hormones released by the brain a few hours before your wake-up time.^[2] They allow you to gradually wake up without being abruptly interrupted by the real alarm clock, indicating that the brain subconsciously hates alarms as much as us.

You don’t need to do anything special to activate it other than sticking to a set schedule, either. This is why routine officegoers often find themselves waking up minutes before the alarm is set to go off.

8 Listen And Learn During Sleep

We understand sleep as a time of partial shutdown for the brain. We certainly don’t expect the brain to have any of its regular abilities while we’re sleeping, especially the ones that allow it to encode learned information on the basis of sensory cues.

Surprisingly, the brain is capable of doing exactly that, as long as it happens during the REM phase. In a study published in Nature Communications, they put 20 volunteers to sleep and played acoustic patterns at them in all stages of their sleep. They were then asked to identify the same patterns when they woke up.

They found that the subjects could identify the sound patterns heard during the REM phase but didn’t recognize the ones from other, deeper phases of sleep.^[3] Now, it certainly doesn’t mean that you can study for your tests while you sleep, but it disproves the previously held notion that the brain is unable to pick up new information when it’s sleeping.

7 Learn Piano With Imaginary Practice

It’s common knowledge that in order to train your brain to get good at something, you have to practice it. Whether it’s learning a new language or handling romantic rejection, there are no shortcuts to grinding it out. There definitely are, though, if you’re talking about learning how to play the piano. Apparently (and bafflingly), according to science at least, simply imagining practicing the piano does the same thing to your brain as actually doing it.

Take, for example, a study by Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who dedicated his life to understanding the impact of mental practice on the brain. Back in 1904, he taught basic piano lessons to two groups of subjects who had no previous experience with the instrument. While one group was taught on the actual piano, the other was just told how to move their fingers and what the notes sound like. At the end of it, he found that both the groups had learned to play the sequence they were taught at a similar skill level.

In the 1990s, the same study was replicated by other researchers, except with additional tools to map the changes in the brain. To their surprise, they found that the imaginary practice had the same impact on the brain as the real thing.^[4]

6 Instantly (And Accurately) Judge Someone’s Character

No matter how nonjudgmental we claim to be, when we meet someone for the first time, we inadvertently make a mental impression of them based on just visual cues. Do they look rich? What’s wrong with their fashion sense? Are those scars criminal in nature? While you’re busy doing that, though, the brain would have already had made a subconscious profile of the person, and a much more accurate one, too.

Research shows that the brain is scarily fast at making up judgements about other people, taking about 0.1 seconds for the whole process.^[5] More importantly, its judgements turn out to be right, whether it’s about their sexuality, competence at the workplace, or political affiliation. It’s when you start to think on your own and override your brain’s judgements that they turn into stereotypes that are often inaccurate. The cues that the brain notes are also impossible to fake.

5 Autopilot Mode

On especially hectic workdays, we all wonder if there’s a way to put ourselves on auto mode. How awesome would it be to just zone out and let your body take over? Other than your full attention, it already has all the parts needed to complete the job.

You’d be surprised to know, then, that the brain doesn’t just have an autopilot mode of its own, but it’s much better at a given task than the active part of the brain. Studies have found that once you get good at something, the brain relegates the processing of that task to a separate brain region called default mode network (DMN), which deals with subconscious processing.

In one of those studies, 28 subjects were asked to play a card game that required a bit of learning and monitored their brain activity. Things went as expected at first, though when they got sufficiently good at the game, it got shifted from the active regions to the DMN. Their responses became faster and much more accurate, too.^[6] It’s the reason why some tasks—like playing an instrument—are more difficult to do when you consciously think about them, though only if you know how to play that instrument (obviously).

It’s not something unheard-of, as we already use that part of the brain for regular stuff like unlocking our car or tying our shoelaces. The study was the first time it had been shown to work for more complicated tasks.

4 Predict The Future

The interaction between the eyes and the brain has been a topic of interest among neuroscientists for quite some time now, and not just for fun’s sake. Properly mapping out the pathways between our eyes and how the brain processes that information can help millions of people suffering from a variety of diseases. It would also give us more of an insight into how the visual processing part of the brain actually works.

While there will be some time before it’s completely understood, we’ve made some key discoveries in the past few years, one of them being the brain’s ability to predict the immediate future.

In a study, researchers found that because of the delay in the information from the eye to the brain, it forms its own predictions of what’s going to happen next, which get more accurate with age. It bases it on previous behavior (like the known trajectory of a ball) and does it before we can consciously figure it out.^[7] So, in essence, we’re always slightly looking into the future, which helps us avoid injury or death by subconsciously predicting potentially threatening events.

3 360-Degree Awareness

It has been speculated—in horror movies as well as real life—that people have a “sixth sense” when it comes to knowing if someone is watching them from behind. You’re supposed to feel uneasy, start sweating, and feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It’s thought of as a vestigial sense from our hunter-gatherer days, though it’s absolutely not. The actual reason it happens is that we’re perfectly able to observe all 360 degrees of our surroundings.

If the eyes seem to be limited by the scope of their field of vision compared to other animals, it’s because the brain doesn’t need to be able to look behind. It has other, better means of making a full-scale 3-D model of our surroundings. Studies have found that our sense of hearing is quite accurate at detecting even the slightest shift in our surroundings, especially the parts we can’t see.^[8] That, combined with our other senses, provide the brain with a largely accurate “view” of all 360 degrees of what’s around us.

2 Build Muscles Just By Thinking About Exercise

It’s summer already (at least for our Northern Hemisphere readers), which means that once again, many of us were unable to get that perfect summer body we had promised ourselves when the year started. It’s largely because of the understandable reason that being fit requires you to work out, which is definitely not easy to do.

Apparently, however, you can do it just by thinking about working out, at least when it comes to building muscles. In a study by researchers at Ohio University, they wrapped the wrists of 29 volunteers in surgical casts. They then asked half of them to think about focusing on exercising their wrists for 11 minutes a day, five times a week. At the end of it, they found that the half that did the imaginary exercise developed muscles twice as strong as the other half, even if they did the same amount of actual exercise—none.^[9]

It’s not just this study, either. Many previous studies have indicated that you can increase the physical strength of your muscles by the power of the mind alone. Can you get six-pack abs by this method, then? Well, you’ll never know until you try!

1 Falsely Convince Itself Of Having Committed A Serious Crime

One of the most complex and mysterious parts of the brain is how it deals with memories. Despite decades of research and case studies, we still only have pieces of the puzzle. We don’t even know exactly which parts of the brain are responsible for storing and retrieving memories, let alone understanding how the brain processes them.

A big part of that mystery is false memories: things that never happened but that you clearly remember. While we’ve known about the brain’s ability to do this for a while, that’s only the beginning of it. We’re not just talking about convincing yourself about borrowed money that never happened but serious stuff like theft or even murder. In one study, 70 percent of subjects were falsely made to believe that they committed crimes like theft or assault with weapon by basic memory-retrieval techniques in interviews.^[10] Of course, there have also been cases where someone was incarcerated for a crime they confessed to despite having an alibi.

We still don’t quite understand why—or even how—the brain is so good at fooling even itself. Theories suggest that it may be because of its propensity toward filling up gaps in the recollection process, even if it’s filling them with inaccurate information.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Our brain is a vital part of our life experience. From the ability to think to the control of our muscles, our brain enables us to do everything. But what about the things our brain does without us consciously thinking about it? In this list, we’ll uncover the secrets of how our brain causes us to do things that we rarely—if ever—think about.

10 Filtering information

It goes without saying that every second of every day, we’re constantly flooded with information—so much information that it’s impossible to take it all in. Without looking, do you know what color socks you put on this morning? What about what the first person you saw today was wearing? If not, don’t worry, your memory isn’t fading yet! Our brain works constantly to filter out information we don’t need to consciously be made aware of. This allows us to focus on what information is important to us. For example, if you’re watching a game of football, you’re probably not aware of what’s going on in the crowd, even though your brain is perceiving this information.

This process is called selective attention and allows us not to be driven insane by the high levels of information that are typically present. Some information can, however, break through the barrier of our focus. This is why when we hear our name in someone else’s conversation, we instantly respond. An experiment to test this theory was carried out by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons at Harvard University, a clip of which can be view above. How many times do you see the players in white pass the ball? The answer might surprise you.

9 Blinking

Blinking is something we all do approximately every two to ten seconds; we only ever realize we’re doing it when someone points it out. (Now you’re probably going to read the rest of the list thinking about it.) But how does our brain manage to keep this process going with no conscious input? Blinking is an automatic reflex action, put in place to protect and maintain the moisture of your eye.

The outside corner of your eyes constantly produce tears. These tears are wiped away by the movement of your eyelids as you blink to keep your eye lubricated and clean. (This explains why our blinks are so evenly distributed.) The automatic system that regulates our blinking patterns also makes sure that our eyelids close when something is about to strike our face. Although we have the ability to stop the process when we think consciously about it (if you choose to have a staring contest), the automated system will eventually force us to blink again.

8 Moving Our Tongue Into Position To Produce Words

When we’re talking, the only thing we’re consciously thinking about is what we’re saying. What we don’t think about is the way that the muscles in our tongue and mouth synchronize together to enable us to verbally articulate language.

Initially, we learn to talk through imitation. We don’t necessarily imitate full sentences but rather piece together different words we hear before we start to be able to interpret meaning, creating a structure for our words to be placed in. As we are imitating and learning these new words, our brain has to think consciously about how to position our tongue to create the intended sound.

However, as our ability to pronounce each sound becomes more developed, our conscious mind is no longer involved in the process of positioning our tongue and lips; it has become an involuntary process. This explains why when we’re talking, we don’t consciously think about where our tongue is. The movements have already been learned by our muscles, and our brain automatically positions our tongue while we’re consciously thinking about what we’re trying to say.

7 Deceiving Us Into Thinking We’re Better

Imagine you have a child who really wants to be an artist, and they bring you a simply awful drawing which they seem to be very proud of. What do you say to them? Most parents would complement the drawing, even if they don’t believe what they’re saying. However, when the child grows up, they may look at the drawing and be horrified that anyone could ever have considered it to be good. When somebody gives us positive feedback, we build a belief that we fit the criteria we are described as. This changes our perspective of ourselves, meaning that we believe we’re better than we actually are.

This concept extends further than talents that have no scientific measurement. A study carried out in the documentary (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies demonstrated how people who believe that they did well on a test are more likely to answer confidently in a following test, even though neither their knowledge nor the ease of the task has changed. In the experiment, participants were given the answers to the first set of questions at the bottom of the page and told that they may look at them if they wished to. Not surprisingly, they did very well on the test. In the second test, no answers were provided, but because the participants had deceived themselves into thinking they were better (even though they cheated on the previous test), they answered questions more quickly and did not erase errors. Despite their confidence, their results plummeted compared to the first test.

6 Regulating Temperature

Not only does our brain control our social processes, but it also regulates things inside the body, such as temperature. It’s vital to our health that our temperature stays at 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 °F); this temperature creates the perfect conditions needed for our body to carry out processes that keep us fully functional, such as providing optimal conditions for digestive enzymes to work in. But how does our brain manage to maintain this constant temperature without us having to ever think about it?

Our external environment is detected by sensory receptors in the skin. This information travels through our nervous system to the hypothalamus in the brain. There are also receptors in the blood that alert the hypothalamus to changes in our internal body temperature. Once the temperature is interpreted, the brain can take the appropriate action to make sure the body stays at the correct temperature. For example, if our external environment is cold, the brain will instruct the hairs on our arms to stand up, which allows them to trap more heat. However, if our external environment is too hot, our brain instructs the body to produce sweat, allowing us to lose body heat through evaporation.

5 Changing Our Memory

Many of us are under the impression that once we’ve experienced something, we will remember it just as it happened; any differences in our ability to retrieve information from the event are due to our memory of it having faded. However, a psychological study performed by Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer in 1974 demonstrated that more goes into it than just that.

In the experiment, participants were shown clips of car crashes and asked a standardized set of questions about what they saw. The participants were put into different groups, all of which were asked the same question but with slightly different wording. The participants in two groups were asked what they thought the speed of the car was, but the verb used to describe the collision was “hit” for one group and “smashed” for the other. A control group wasn’t asked about the speed at all.

A couple of weeks later, participants were asked questions again about the clips they saw. This time, they were asked, “Did you see any broken glass?” There was no broken glass in the clip. Participants who were told that the cars “smashed” (and who predicted the cars to be at a higher speed) inaccurately recalled seeing broken glass far more than the participants in the control and “hit” conditions. This suggests that our brain can recreate elements of a memory from new information given to it, which becomes stored as part of our original memory, resulting in a false memory.

4 Maintaining Balance

When we’re walking, most of us don’t think twice about it. What we fail to consider is how much our brain is working to ensure that we maintain a stable balance. The brain works out how to maintain this balance through sensory input from the eyes, muscles, joints, and vestibular organs.

Our eyes are able to perceive the world around us through light hitting the rods and cones in our retinas, which send visual impulses to the brain, alerting it to where objects and other stimuli in the environment are in relation to us.

Muscles and joints are responsible for sending signals to our brain about the amount of stretch and pressure while walking. When we lean forward, more pressure is felt in the front part of the soles of our feet. Any movement made by our body parts sends a signal to our brain, which allows it to judge where we are in space. Cues given from the ankle also allow our brain to measure the texture and quality of the surface, which enables us to accurately sway in relation to the ground.

3 Making Us Sneeze

Sometimes the overwhelming urge to sneeze can seem to come from nowhere. Although sneezing can be caused by allergies or a stimulus causing an itch, more often than not, we don’t realize there is something in our nose bothering us until we sneeze to remove the irritation.

When we sneeze, the irritation is located in the respiratory epithelium lining the nose. Mast cells, such as inflammatory cells like eosinophils, produce chemicals such as histamine or leukotrienes. This chemical release is triggered by the irritating substance, which can be something that triggers as an allergen; filtered particles, a viral respiratory infection, or a physical irritant like smoke. After the irritating stimulus triggers the chemical release, vessels in the nose leak fluid, which ultimately stimulates nerve endings, causing itching. But how does our brain actually produce the sneeze?

The stimulation of each nerve ending activates a reflex response within the brain. The sensory nerves cause the activation of nerves controlling the muscles in the neck and head. The rapid air flow from the nose is achieved by a buildup of pressure within the chest while the vocal chords are closed (all which is part of the reflex action). As the vocal chords quickly reopen, the air flows out with high velocity, simultaneously removing the irritating stimulus.

2 Shivering

We’ve probably all experienced shivering when we’ve been out in the cold for too long. But what is it that actually causes our body to shake uncontrollably?

Shivering is another reflex action put into place for our own protection. The reaction is created by triggering the hypothalamus, which is located just above the thalamus in the brain. When sensory receptors in the skin detect a cold temperature in the external environment, our nervous system sends a signal to the hypothalamus to alert it to this information. The hypothalamus then sends signals to your muscles, causing them to rapidly contract.

Shivering raises our body temperature. Despite our best efforts not to shiver, it is out of our control, being a reflex action. Whenever your hypothalamus detects temperature below a certain point, it kicks in the shivering reaction, which will not stop until the temperature is raised above a certain point.

1 Laughing

Have you ever been in a serious situation where laughing would be completely inappropriate, yet for some reason you just couldn’t hold back the giggles? Don’t worry, you can blame your brain!

A paper published in 1998 gave some explanation as to how the brain is involved in our impulse to laugh. A girl labeled as A.K. is discussed in the paper after having undergoune surgery to control her epilepsy. The doctor discovered that stimulating a roughly 4-square-centimeter (0.6 in²) area of the superior frontal gyrus (part of the frontal lobe of the brain) always triggered laughter from A.K. This area of the brain is a part of the supplementary motor area. When A.K. explained why she was laughing, she thought of something after the laughter. This is usually the opposite for most people, as we perceive something as funny and then laugh as a response.

Authors of the paper believe that our experience of laughter is triggered by several different areas of the brain, each responsible for adding different elements to the experience. There’s the emotional reaction, the cognitive process of understanding why something is funny, and ultimately the uncontrollable part of the reaction, which involves the movement of facial muscles to create a smile. After interpreting something as funny, our physical reaction to the situation is created by our brain’s reaction, making is very difficult to control.

17-year-old student. Interested in writing and discovery.

During its short known existence, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) has created quite a name for itself—profound for some and obscene for others. The popularity and infamy of LSD is a rather mixed bag.

It’s been used for everything from lab experiments to party drugs. LSD has also been tested on subjects in a wide range of applications—from a medication to aid in the quest for mental health to a powerful weapon of war. Still, there is much to learn about this wonder drug.

On his deathbed from cancer, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, instructed his wife to bring a syringe filled with liquid LSD so that he could go on the world’s craziest trip. She gave him a 100-microgram shot of LSD and repeated that dosage one hour later. He died on what is probably the biggest dose of the powerful hallucinogen that the world has ever known.

But what was it like? What can science and studies of the brain tell us about how LSD makes us feel and how it alters our perception and experience? For those of you curious about these sorts of questions, here is a list of 10 things that LSD does to the human brain.

10 Awakening

While not all is known about the effects of LSD on the brain, researchers have been able to find out quite a bit about this elusive mystery: “What the hell happens to your brain when you take LSD?”

For anyone who’s taken LSD, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the drug activates many of the otherwise inactive parts of your brain. In fact, it’s quite astonishing that the dormant areas of the brain light up like a candle on fMRI machines when a person on LSD gets a scan.

For the brain, the LSD experience is like a symphony of neurons firing. Science has shown that LSD awakens even the parts of the brain which are usually dark, hibernating in the deepest of slumbers.^[1]

9 Full Power

Another unexpected discovery is that this activation of parts of the brain that are normally sleeping isn’t modest or negligible. As shown in the image above, almost all of the brain is activated, using all of its neurons and potential at the same time.

Without a doubt, scans have shown that LSD affects the entire brain at once, creating a cacophony out of ordinary experience. What parts of the brain does LSD actually affect? All of them!^[2]

8 Regulation

LSD strongly affects the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is also impacted when people take other drugs such as MDMA (aka Ecstasy). Although MDMA, like LSD, works on several neurotransmitters, its most popular and pronounced effect is the classic “euphoria” feeling caused by flooding the brain with serotonin.^[3]

As a regulatory neurotransmitter, serotonin keeps your body’s systems in balance so that you feel “normal” and stable. Serotonin regulates the body’s mood, temperature, hunger, sleep patterns, and much more. That’s why messing with these drugs can sometimes get people into trouble. When their bodies receive too much serotonin, they can’t regulate these important functions.

7 Hallucination

With the body’s serotonin levels in disarray and the regulation centers of the brain out of whack, the body starts to perceive things inaccurately on LSD, otherwise known as having hallucinations. On LSD-induced hallucinations, the United States government notes:

Ingesting hallucinogenic drugs can cause users to see images, hear sounds, and feel sensations that seem real but do not exist. Their effects typically begin within 20 to 90 minutes of ingestion and can last as long as 12 hours. Experiences are often unpredictable and may vary with the amount ingested and the user’s personality, mood, expectations, and surroundings.

The effects of hallucinogens like LSD can be described as drug-induced psychosis—distortion or disorganization of a person’s capacity to recognize reality, think rationally, or communicate with others. Users refer to LSD and other hallucinogenic experiences as “trips” and to acute adverse or unpleasant experiences as “bad trips.”

On some trips, users experience sensations that are enjoyable and mentally stimulating and that produce a sense of heightened understanding. Bad trips, however, include terrifying thoughts and nightmarish feelings of anxiety and despair that include fears of losing control, insanity, or death.^[4]

To some, this sounds like an absolutely awful experience that no one would want. But others will pay good money for it. A user’s mood and overall mental state going into the psychedelic LSD experience plays a pivotal role in the outcome of that episode. The trip appears to be in the eye of the beholder in more ways than one.

Although LSD is known to have a particularly strong effect on the serotonin receptors, namely the 5-Ht2A receptor, it’s not clear exactly how LSD produces hallucinations. One belief is that the drug causes receptors to fire at random and misfire, resulting in a sort of total brain “static” or “noise” on the otherwise calm backdrop of normal neural functioning. This static noise is said to lead to profound alterations of consciousness.

6 Harmless?

Although we’re not going to say that LSD is harmless, it is considerably safer than drugs like alcohol or opiates according to DrugAbuse.com and some other sources. In addition, overdoses are rare.^[5]

Have you ever met someone who overdosed on LSD? Probably not.

In fact, there is some recent evidence (confirming old information) that LSD may be useful in the treatment of alcoholism. AA founding member Bill Wilson mentioned that he tried LSD as a cure for alcoholism with moderate success. However, the effects wore off and he ended up drinking again.

5 Commitment

The use of LSD requires a definite commitment to these altered brain states. Most studies and observations claim that the LSD “trip” typically lasts 8–12 hours (usually 12). That’s half a day for one dose. Needless to say, LSD users had better be prepared for their brains to be completely changed and uninhibited for quite a long time.

VeryWellMind.com notes that LSD impacts your body and mind for at least 12 hours after you take it. As the drug is made and sold illegally, you can’t be sure how pure it is or what dosage you’re taking. Those factors influence your “trip” and how long the drug stays in your system.^[6]

4 The Loss Of Self

Many users report feeling a loss of the “self,” which is the lack of differentiation between the self and the world or the environment. They often report being one with each other, with nature, or with some other object that obviously isn’t the self. There may be a neurological reason for this.

In 2012, researchers undertook the first study in the UK to actually administer LSD to patients. (It had been illegal to do so for the previous 40 years.) Of course, the study showed that LSD activates the brain. But the researchers also found that the “seat of consciousness” in the brain (the part that’s called our “default mode”) receives less blood under the influence of LSD.

The default mode network is the “resting” portion of the brain, which is most active when the brain is at rest. This part of the brain is mainly made up of the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial temporal lobe, and the posterior cingulate cortex. These regions largely control things like daydreaming and imagination, which explains why LSD affects the proper functioning of the pictorial imagination and users experience visual hallucinations.

As the retrosplenial cortex and the parahippocampus in the default mode network become more disconnected from one another, LSD users experience greater “ego loss.” Together, these regions of the brain appear to produce the typical “sense of self” that we experience when we’re awake. In addition, brain networks that are usually segregated begin to communicate with each other in a major way when influenced by LSD.^[7]

3 Psychosis

In a very real way, LSD creates a temporary psychosis in the brain, albeit a mild and some would say an enjoyable one. This isn’t surprising because the default mode network also plays a role in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar depression. Changes in this region of the brain are correlated with these types of mental illnesses.

Since the 1960s, when research into LSD was banned, there have been widespread fears about permanent psychosis occurring after an LSD experience. However, research in the 21st century showed that these concerns were entirely unfounded.^[8]

2 Rehabilitation

Although it is groundbreaking and brand-new, some evidence shows that LSD helps a variety of mental illnesses, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar depression. However, these results seem to be paradoxical.

On the one hand, LSD sends the brain into an acute, temporary state of psychosis by altering its natural resting state on a base level. On the other hand, the drug seems to alleviate psychoses and other mental illnesses for at least several months after consumption. This is like an odd chemical version of electroshock therapy.

LSD shows particularly strong promise in the treatment of depression. Doctors and researchers are hopeful that the drug will help those diagnosed with terminal cancer to treat their ongoing battles with depression.

According to a Cambridge study, LSD elevated mood and made users more optimistic two weeks after taking the drug—without increased delusional thinking. So it seems like the symptoms of psychosis occur shortly after taking LSD, but the longer-term effects include a more positive well-being caused by “loosened cognition.”^[9]

With its long-term effects on serotonin receptors, LSD seems to act like many of our modern-day antidepressants, particularly SSRIs which enhance the functioning of serotonin receptors. Any enhancement of the serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) may prove to have similar effects to drugs like Prozac. Time will tell as more studies are performed.

1 The Religious Experience

In one of the first studies on LSD, researchers from Harvard University conducted an experiment with the drug in a chapel basement on Good Friday 1962. They gave 10 divinity students LSD to see if it would create a mystical or even religious experience. The results were considered a success as the participants did share a religious experience.

This was the start of what would become a massive movement in the United States to study LSD at colleges. Then the government stepped in and banned LSD research on humans.

Studies have shown that the left hemisphere of the brain controls and dictates our sense of self. The right hemisphere has something to do with a sense of “presence.” This has been evidenced by the God Helmet, a helmet with electrodes which stimulates a sense of presence, often divine, when put on regular people.

This isn’t pseudoscientific hocus-pocus, either. This is legitimate neuroscience. Current research suggests that LSD may stimulate the same regions or function in the same manner as the God Helmet. Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, who conducted the previously mentioned 2012 experiment about the loss of self, has stated:

Our results suggest that this effect underlies the profound altered state of consciousness that people often describe during an LSD experience. It is also related to what people sometimes call “ego-dissolution,” which means the normal sense of self is broken down and replaced by a sense of reconnection with themselves, others, and the natural world. This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way—and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug’s effects have subsided.^[10]

Modern research may someday link the God Helmet and the LSD user experience. It’s possible that LSD stimulates right-hemispheric activity while sedating the left hemisphere (loss of the sense of self and ego) to create what users have reported as the religious LSD experience.

Brain scans also show that LSD affects the temporal lobe most of all. The temporal lobe is responsible for memory and is aggressively stimulated when wearers experience the mild-altering changes of the God Helmet. The brain is a curious organ, and there is much to be learned. In time, our society may realize that many illegal substances may provide a deeper understanding into the workings of the human mind, the last great frontier.

I like to write about dark stuff, horror, philosophy, and history. This article will be shared on Beautifully Disturbed, my Facebook page with several thousand followers, as well as in Acid Math groups and other such applicable places where the audiences will read and enjoy it.

Optical illusions are like magicians. They make you question everything your eyes tell you. They’re not just pictures—they’re more like windows into how our brains process information. Get ready for these ten mind-boggling optical illusions to blow your mind. By the time you’re done with this list, you’ll be scratching your head and marveling at the power of your own mind.

Related: Top 10 Simple Things That Mess With The Mind

10 The Vanishing Dots

Imagine a grid of evenly spaced dots on a black background. Simple, right? But when you stare at this grid, something incredible happens – the dots seem to vanish into thin air! It’s like they’re playing a game of hide and seek with your brain.

This optical illusion, the Hermann Grid, occurs because of how your eyes and brain work together. Your eyes have cells that detect contrast. When you focus on one dot, the surrounding dots’ contrast decreases, making them disappear. Your brain is essentially trying to fill in the gaps, and that’s when the magic happens.

What’s truly fascinating about the Hermann Grid illusion is that scientists use it to study visual processing in our brains. Researchers have found that certain cells in the visual cortex, called end-stopped cells, play a crucial role in creating this illusion. These cells are responsible for detecting the edges and boundaries of objects. When you focus on a dot in the grid, these end-stopped cells become activated. They ultimately enhance the illusion of vanishing dots. So it’s not just a simple disappearing act. It’s a glimpse into the intricate workings of our visual system.

9 The Rotating Snakes

Have you ever wished you could witness the snakes dancing without the fear of being bitten? This optical illusion won’t give you a front-row seat to a reptilian tango. But it will make you believe you’re watching snakes slither and twist right before your eyes.

Known as the rotating snake, this mind-boggling image consists of seemingly rotating snakes on a static background. But here’s the kicker—the snakes aren’t actually moving at all! It’s all in your head.

The rotating snake illusion is a prime example of how patterns and contrasts can fool our brains. It’s not just about the snakes. This illusion can appear in various forms, like wheels appearing to spin backward or stationary objects seeming to move. Scientists believe this illusion occurs because our brains are hardwired to detect motion. When they encounter patterns that mimic motion, they fill in the gaps, creating the illusion of movement.

8 The Impossible Triangle

Imagine an object that seems to defy the laws of geometry. That’s what you get with the impossible triangle. Also known as the Penrose Triangle or Tri-bar, this optical illusion presents a three-dimensional triangular figure. It looks like it could never exist in the real world. Each segment appears to connect seamlessly, forming a never-ending loop.

The Penrose Triangle, created by the mathematician Roger Penrose, is a masterpiece of optical art. It continues to intrigue mathematicians and artists alike. What’s remarkable is that this object can be drawn on a flat surface, and it looks plausible when viewed from a specific angle. However, when you try to construct it in three dimensions, you hit a brick wall—it defies the laws of physics.

7 The Ames Room

Welcome to the world of the Ames Room. This mind-bending optical illusion is a specially constructed room that messes with your sense of perspective. When looking into the Ames Room through a peephole, it appears to be a perfectly normal, rectangular space. But when people walk inside, they magically change size, growing or shrinking depending on their position within the room.

The Ames Room is actually cleverly designed with distorted angles and proportions. It fools your brain into perceiving a three-dimensional space that doesn’t exist. The Ames Room is not just a party trick. It has real applications in film and entertainment.

Filmmakers have used this optical illusion to create scenes where characters appear to change size. Remember those scenes in The Lord of the Rings when Gandalf and Frodo looked like they were vastly different sizes? That’s the magic of the Ames Room at work.

6 The Floating Cube Illusion

Imagine a cube that seems to levitate in mid-air, hovering mysteriously before your eyes. This optical illusion challenges your depth perception and your sense of reality. When you look at the cube, it appears to pop out from the background or even rotate without any logical explanation.

Want the truth? The cube is a two-dimensional image cleverly designed to create the illusion of depth and movement. Your brain fills in the missing pieces, making it appear as though the cube is defying the laws of physics.

The floating cube illusion is really all about perspective and shading. The clever use of light and shadow creates the perception of a three-dimensional object where none exists. Artists and designers have used similar techniques to create stunning 3D artworks on flat surfaces, giving the illusion of depth and dimension.

5 The Café Wall Illusion

Have you ever wondered how a simple pattern of black and white tiles could make you question your sense of lines and angles? That’s the magic of the café wall illusion.

Imagine a wall adorned with alternating rows of black and white tiles. At first glance, the lines forming the rows appear slanted. However, when you measure them carefully, you’ll find they are perfectly straight. This optical illusion is an example of how our brains interpret patterns and contrast. It makes us see things that aren’t really there.

The café wall illusion, first discovered in the 1970s, is a striking example of the Gestalt principles of visual perception. It tricks our brains by using contrasting colors and patterns that create the illusion of slanted lines. The horizontal lines are interrupted by alternating rows of black and white squares, which create the misperception of slanting lines. This illusion reminds us that our minds seek patterns and relationships in the visual world. Sometimes leading us to see things that aren’t there.

4 The Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion

Cylinders are pretty straightforward, right? Not when they’re in the world of optical illusions! The ambiguous cylinder illusion challenges your perception by presenting cylinders that look like a mix of squares and circles.

When you view these shapes from different angles, your brain can’t decide whether they’re round or square. In reality, the shapes are cylindrical. But your brain’s interpretation creates the illusion of a shape-shifting object that leaves you questioning the nature of reality. The ambiguous cylinder illusion was first created by Kokichi Sugihara, a Japanese mathematician and artist. Through it, we see the power of perspective and how our brains interpret visual cues.

3 The Blivet

Imagine a bizarre, three-pronged object that seems to defy logic and geometry. This optical illusion, known as the Blivet, presents an impossible object. It has three cylindrical prongs when viewed from one angle but only two when viewed from another. It’s as though the object is constantly morphing and changing shape right before your eyes.

The Blivet is a prime example of how optical illusions can challenge our understanding of the physical world, leaving us in awe of the power of perception. The Blivet, also known as the impossible fork, was first popularized by the artist M.C. Escher.

This illusion plays with our perception of depth and perspective. The Blivet reminds us that our brains constantly interpret visual cues to create a coherent picture of the world. Still, those cues can sometimes lead us to perceive the impossible as possible.

2 The Hollow Face Illusion

What if I told you that a concave object could appear convex? That’s what happens in the hollow face illusion.

Imagine a mask with a hollowed-out, concave face. When you look at it, the face protrudes outward like a regular convex face. Your brain interprets the face based on familiar expectations, assuming it’s convex even though it’s not. This illusion demonstrates how our brain’s prior knowledge and expectations can override what our eyes see.

This leads to a mind-bending experience. The hollow face illusion is a striking example of how our brains use context and prior knowledge to make sense of the world. This phenomenon is not limited to faces; it can also occur with other objects.

1 The Spinning Dancer

Last but not least, we have the Spinning Dancer, a mesmerizing optical illusion that challenges your perception of motion. At first glance, you might see a silhouette of a dancer spinning either clockwise or counterclockwise. Some people see her spinning one way, while others see the opposite. This illusion is a reminder of how our brains interpret visual cues differently. It gives us a taste of the complex inner workings of our visual system.

The Spinning Dancer illusion is often used to illustrate the concept of multistable perception. This means that our brains can perceive the same visual stimulus in multiple ways, and we can switch between these perceptions based on our focus and attention.

When you look at the dancer, your brain processes the image in a way that makes her appear to spin in one direction. But with a shift in your attention, you can make her reverse direction. This phenomenon highlights how our brains constantly interpret and reinterpret the visual world around us.

The human brain is the biggest reason behind our utter dominance on Earth. We may not be able to fly, have the best claws, or run particularly fast, but thanks to the capability of our brains, we have managed to climb our way to the top of the evolutionary hierarchy. Despite all of that, though, the brain still has its limitations. There are many things we can’t do because of those limitations, and such inabilities often show up at the worst times.

Thankfully for us all, scientists are consistently working on coming up with hacks to overcome our brains’ limits, as there is still a lot we don’t understand about the most important part of the body. Here are ten ways you can hack your brain to your advantage, according to science.

10 Be More Attractive By Believing You Smell Good

It comes as a surprise to no one that smelling good makes you more attractive to the opposite sex, as we instinctively associate smell with hygiene. It’s a more understated cue of attractiveness than other, obvious ones, like looks or personality, but it nevertheless plays an equally important role in deciding the outcome of a date. We’re not just talking about how you smell, but also how you think you smell.

According to a study, merely believing that you smell good increases your chances of getting with the ladies. (The study was only done with male subjects.) Researchers gave scented spray to one half of a group of equivalently attractive participants and a generic, odorless spray to the other half and took videos. They then showed the videos to a group of women, asking them to rate the men on attractiveness. Surprisingly, the women rated the men with the scented spray to be more attractive, even if they had no way of knowing how the men smelled just from video clips.^[1]

It suggests that self-perception doesn’t just influence the level of your confidence but also affects how other people perceive you.

9 Use Gestures To Prepare For A Test

Students use a variety of techniques to help themselves retain information before an upcoming test, from the traditional writing things down to the more new-age yoga before a studying session. As all of us know, though, most of those techniques are hit-or-miss, as no one has been able to perfectly figure out the best way to guarantee memory retention. While we’re not claiming to have solved pre-test preparation, there’s one scientifically proven method you can use that definitely works: using gestures while studying.^[2]

Studies have found that when you use gestures to explain the information to yourself, the brain retains it far more effectively than, say, speaking it out aloud or even writing it down. In fact, in one study, researchers found that only speaking while learning a concept had no effect on information retention at all.

8 Use The Sun To Hallucinate

While we’d like to reiterate our stance against abusing drugs for recreation, we have to admit that hallucinations are awesome. There are a few things as fun as making the brain see things that aren’t there, but because illicit drugs seem to be the only way to do it, many people never get to experience it. If you’re one of them and would like to know how it feels without being on the wrong side of the law, there’s some good news. As one physiologist from the 19th century found out, all you need to hallucinate without drugs is the Sun.

Just close your eyes and point them toward the sun. Then wave your hand back and forth across the face while keeping one eye covered. Pretty soon, you’ll start seeing shapes, and while the exact figures vary according to person, you can expect hallucinations like spirals, hexagons, or squares.^[3]

Another way you can legally hallucinate is by exploiting something called the Ganzfeld effect, wherein the brain fills in visual information of its own after long periods of sensory deprivation. Just put a piece of white paper over your eyes, lie down under bright white light, and use noise-canceling headphones to block out any sound for 20 minutes. When you get up, you’d be treated to some good old visuals (as they presumably call them in the world of illegal drugs).

7 Trick Your Brain Into Thinking A Rubber Arm Is Real

We’ve all heard of the phantom limb, wherein people who’ve had limbs amputated can still feel the presence of their missing appendage, to the extent that they can feel pain and other sensations in it. While still mind-blowing, it has been extensively studied and talked about. What’s surprising, however, is that you can do something similar with your existing limbs, as well.

In an experiment, researchers asked volunteers to put both their arms on the table, with their right hand inside a box. They then placed a rubber arm on the box and aligned it with the participants’ right shoulders in the same position as their real arms, with just the tips of fingers visible. When the scientists stroked both the fake and real hands for a minute or two, they were surprised to find that eventually, the volunteers started perceiving the fake hand as the real one.^[4]

Scientists don’t quite understand how it works, though they’re sure that it has something to do with how the brain gives priority to visual cues over anything else while determining the ownership of its parts. Now you definitely can’t use this one to, say, get out of tricky situations, but it makes for a freaky diversion at otherwise dull parties.

6 Stop Yourself From Choking By Singing

How many times has it happened that you’re called to speak in front of a group, and before you can say anything, the words seem to get stuck in your throat? It’s not just psychological, either; for many people, that choking is quite real. And seeing how public speaking is one of the biggest fears around, it happens to more people than you’d think. If only there was a way to counter it.

Fortunately for us all, science has figured out a way to effectively halt choking in high-stress situations. All you need to do is sing a song to yourself, as it distracts the brain and helps alleviate the feeling of panic you get in those moments.^[5] In case singing is not a socially acceptable option, like during a meeting, you can also try other things like counting backward from any number or simply focusing other things.

5 Listen To Classical Music To Improve Learning

Music affects all of us in different ways that we can’t quite put into words. Essentially, though, it’s an escape from the sounds of the real world and can get us through some difficult times. It’s also related to productivity, as anyone who has ever breezed through a deadline with their earphones plugged in can tell you. However, because everyone’s brain is different, and music appeals in a different way to everyone, we don’t have a unified theory on how it relates to productivity.

While it will be some time before we can perfectly figure that out, thanks to one study, we know of one type of music that increases creativity and learning for everyone, regardless of their preference: classical music.

In the study, 249 students were observed during a lecture, albeit in two groups. One had classical music playing in the background during the lecture; the other did not. When they tested them in a multiple-choice exam immediately afterward, they were surprised to find out that the students who learned with classical music performed much better.^[6]

4 Aroma Of Rosemary Improves Mental Ability

The benefits of essential oils on the brain are oft-repeated but largely unproven. We’re not denying their effectiveness in making you feel good, which can automatically have a positive effect on your brain. In terms of tangible benefits, though, none of the essential oils are scientifically proven to do anything. Well, except for rosemary.

Presumably in a bid to decisively prove the essential oils crowd wrong, researchers put a bunch of people in a room filled with rosemary aroma and asked them to do a variety of subtraction and visual-information-processing tests. To their surprise, and possibly dismay, there was a definite improvement in the participants’ performance as the scientists increased the dosage of the aroma.^[7]

They’re not quite sure why that is, but it suggests that rosemary has a positive impact on the brain’s cognitive abilities, so stock up on it before your next test.

3 Chew Gum To Reduce Anxiety And Depression

Apart from the approximately six seconds that the flavor lasts, chewing gum doesn’t seem to have any benefits at all. Despite it not clearly falling into any category of things—like food or activities—many people love to chew gum, and it remains a largely successful industry. What gives?

According to science, there are some clear benefits to chewing gum, and it is one of the few proven ways you can force your brain to behave that we know of. In a study, they found that chewing gum significantly lowers anxiety levels. The effects were most pronounced after two weeks of regular gum-chewing. That probably explains why that guy who was always chewing gum in high school was so “chill,” though it doesn’t stop there. Gum chewers also fare better at battling depression and fatigue than others.^[8]

2 Study In Spaced Intervals To Retain More Information

Students have been trying to find the perfect way to study in order to fare better at exams since time immemorial, albeit without much success. Even scientists aren’t exactly sure about how memories are formed in the brain, and figuring it out has been a longstanding pursuit in the neuroscience world.

One oft-repeated technique that is thought to work before tests is the brute force method: Just continuously read the subject matter, and you’re bound to remember it sooner or later. We believe it because everyone says it works, though according to some research, it actually makes you remember less information than if you’d studied in intervals.

Known as spaced repetition, this method requires you to take breaks in the learning process instead of repeatedly trying to cram information in. Studies prove that the latter is actually detrimental to retaining information, as the brain needs time to make the connections required to form a lasting memory.^[9]

1 Smiling Can Trick Your Brain Into Thinking You’re Happy

People smile because they’re happy, as most of us must have figured out by now. It’s a purely social feature of the body, and its only purpose is to let other people know that you’re having a good time, even if it’s fake.

What most people may not know, however, is that smiling isn’t just a response to being happy; it works the other way around, too. As many studies have found, just the act of smiling releases a bunch of feel-good chemicals—like dopamine and serotonin—in your brain. It also reduces stress and anxiety in high-pressure situations, lowers blood pressure, and may even help you live longer.

More interestingly, it doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like smiling at all; the mere act of smiling causes the brain to do all of those things, regardless of any other factors.^[10]

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Our brains are an incredibly important part of our bodies. They give us our personality, thoughts, and emotions and enable us to interpret and interact with the world around us. It’s an organ we can’t get a transplant for, so it’s incredibly important that we take care of the one we have right now.

Unfortunately, there area lot of ways to hurt our brains, some of which may be surprising. So let’s take a look at some of the ways a brain can be harmed, sometimes permanently, and (ideally) do just the opposite.

10 Not Exercising Enough

We need to exercise. Yes, it’s tough, it takes time, and maybe it’s boring, but we need it. Our bodies need it. It’s recommended that we have at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day. If, like everyone else these days, it seems a burden to dedicate a whole half hour to yet another task, don’t worry. Short bursts of exercise are great. Maybe take the stairs instead of the elevator. Get up from the desk and walk around the office. Take the dog for a walk when you get home.

There is evidence that exercising like we are supposed to will also help with memory. It is actually one of the very few memory enhancers that has good evidence backing it up. Don’t worry about having to follow a certain routine or perform exercises that you hate or cannot physically do; all you need to do is be sure to sweat. Working up a good sweat is key.

A good type of workout to focus on is aerobic exercise. As we get older, our brains actually decrease in size, by approximately five percent every ten years. Aerobic exercise is great for keeping that heart rate up and pumping more oxygen throughout your body. As we exercise, our bodies produce a chemical, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that helps fight this decrease and maintain our cognitive functions.^[1]

9 Taking Those Memory-Enhancing Supplements

All those memory-enhancing supplements that are advertised everywhere? Yeah, generally speaking, the only thing they enhance is the wallet of the manufacturer. There’s not much, if any, reliable evidence that these supplements are actually helping us unless we are actually deficient in a vitamin.

The evidence also shows that while supplements might not have much benefit, they still carry risk. Do you know how supplements are regulated in the United States? As long as the manufacturer follows good manufacturing processes, claims to have supporting research, don’t make specific medical claims, and includes a disclaimer on the label, they’re good to go.^[2] The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t actually follow up and evaluate the research of any supplement unless evidence comes to light that it’s dangerous. So as long as the supplement only slightly harms people, not enough to really gain attention, then it will probably never be noticed by the FDA.

In addition to these supplements probably not helping us, and maybe harming us, they might also interact with other medicines we are taking. Be sure to talk with your doctor before using herbal supplements so that they can help you avoid some potentially nasty side effects.

8 Can’t Get Enough Of Those Cigarettes

When we smoke, we don’t just hurt the brain; we’re actually causing harm to almost every organ in our bodies. Although the damage to all of these organs can have an effect on the brain as well, let’s focus on what specifically happens to the brain.

It’s probably not a surprise to you that cigarettes have nicotine, but did you know that nicotine actually causes your brain to change? It’s true. Cigarettes flood our brains with so much nicotine that they actually build more receptors to handle it all. Now that our brains have all these receptors, if we don’t keep them happy, then we’ll go into withdrawal and probably be smoking again before long.

Having a ton of nicotine receptors isn’t all that happens to our brains. Research has shown that people who smoke have, on average, a thinner cortex than those who don’t smoke.^[3] This is huge because the cortex (aka the cerebral cortex) is where the brain processes memory, language, and perception. As the cortex shrinks, the brain’s abilities in those areas also shrinks. Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t completely go away after someone stops; come cortical thickness will be restored but not all.

7 Enjoying Alcohol A Bit Too Much

Alcohol has benefits for our health, as you probably know. Maybe you even think of this fact every time you refill your glass of wine or take another shot of whiskey. Unfortunately, as in all things, too much alcohol is bad for you.

How much is too much, though? Studies show that two drinks a day is the maximum amount that doesn’t cause harm. But how much is a drink? For beer, it’s 12 fluid ounces, assuming the beer is five-percent alcohol by volume (ABV). For wine, it’s 5 fluid ounces at 12-percent ABV. For 80-proof spirits, like whiskey, it’s just 1.5 fluid ounces. Take each of those measures and multiply by two to see just where the limit should be each day. So that’s the limit, but what really happens if you go over that?

There’s a lot that can happen if we drink too much. We can develop high blood pressure, have a stroke, or cause damage that leads to heart failure.^[4] Brains desperately need a good, steady flow of blood in order to function properly. If we start messing with that flow through damage to our heart, then our brain will suffer the consequences.

6 Indulging A Bit Too Much In The Sugary Stuff

Our bodies need sugar, in the form of glucose. The brain, as the most energy-hungry organ in the body, needs a lot of sugar. Half of the sugar needed by the body goes to the brain. The brain uses the energy from that sugar to power neurotransmitters, which facilitate communication throughout the brain and are fundamental for memory and learning. If a brain is low on sugar, then these abilities suffer. So we should make sure to give our brains an abundance of sugar, right? No. I’m really sorry, but no.

Having too much sugar in the diet, by virtue of leading to weight gain, can cause the body to develop a resistance to insulin. Insulin is a hormone that the body uses to regulate its blood sugar levels. That’s why insulin is so important for people with diabetes. Unfortunately, if the sugar intake causes changes in insulin levels, then that can change how cells use and store sugar.^[5] This change affects how the neurons use sugar and therefore how they facilitate communication throughout the brain.

In case you’re curious, the worst kind of sugar we can have is high-fructose corn syrup. Unfortunately, food companies use this in so many types of foods that it’s extremely difficult to avoid.

5 Burning The Midnight Oil A Little Too Much

We all need sleep. There’s no getting around it. We can fight it all we want, but eventually, sleep will find us. Fortunately, sleep is a good thing; it helps us form new memories and learn through the creation of pathways in the brain. Sleep also helps remove toxins that build up in our brains while we are awake. Adults need seven to nine hours of sleep on average.

Unfortunately, the demands of life step in and make sleep seem not that important. We have some great party to attend, a school project to finish, or a virtual opponent to crush in some video game. We can just catch up on sleep later, right? If we get a few hours, then we’ll have a tough day tomorrow, but it’ll all get fixed tomorrow night.

Sadly, that’s not really the case. This lack of sleep can cause lasting harm to the brain. Every night that sleep is avoided is another night that the brain won’t effectively form new memories and store needed information. Depression can start to form, which may further feed insomnia. Lack of sleep can also increase appetite, which can lead people to eat more (potentially sugary) foods and develop obesity.^[6]

4 Being A Homebody

Did you know that spending time with family and friends is important for your brain? It’s true. Being social can strengthen your brain and decrease the risk of dementia. How does that work? Having positive social engagements improves mental health, thus improving our outlook and reducing the risk of depression, which is certainly known to have a negative effect on the brain. Actively engaging with people also helps to improve your memory and other cognitive skills.

What’s even better is if you pair social engagement with physical activity. Going for a walk with someone in the park, attending a class at a gym, or visiting a museum allows you to engage socially and hit your exercise goals. It’s a two-for-one deal!

All of this social engagement keeps your mind active. An active mind is key to fighting dementia. It’s suspected that older people have a harder time switching between active thinking and daydreaming, which can then lead to weakening of the mind.^[7] With socialization, new memories are gained, information is shared, and then when we sleep, our brains can assimilate this data and form new connections and strengthen others.

That doesn’t mean that we should always be socially active, of course. Peaceful, quiet time at home can have a tremendous value. Just make sure that there is a balance.

3 Not Taking Medicine When We’re Supposed To

Blood is incredibly important to the brain. That’s obvious, right? Our brains need a constant flow of blood and sugars to keep operating, and any disruption or change in the flow can have a significant effect.

If someone has been diagnosed with hypertension or diabetes, there’s a good chance they are taking medicine every day to keep it under control. If some doses are skipped, that can cause premature damage to the brain and blood vessels. Making certain that medicine is taken at the correct times, without forgetting a dose, can keep the blood flowing correctly and delay the progression of disease.

Delaying such progression is important. Studies have shown that people with type 2 diabetes are more likely to have vascular and Alzheimer’s dementia.^[8] These people are also more likely to have cardiovascular disease and hypertension, which affect the flow of blood to the brain.

2 Lost In A Daydream

Keeping brains active is important to their survival. Brains need input and new information to process in order to continue building and strengthening connections. As said earlier, the more often brains, especially older brains, work to switch between focused and unfocused states, the harder it might become to keep switching.

In fact, research has shown an amnesic effect to daydreaming. The farther your mind travels from where you are now, the greater the effect, and the harder it is to remember what happened before the daydream. There was a study which showed that participants who were asked to daydream about a very recent event (a few hours ago) were better at remembering words they’d just been shown than people who daydreamed of events from weeks ago.^[9]

1 Enjoying Some Cannabis

Cannabis has many, many uses. It can make people feel good, relaxed, pain-free, and so on. Unfortunately, it can also impair memory. Research has historically had a difficult time determining the exact effects that cannabis has on memory, but there are effects.

These effects are especially noticeable the younger the person is. Studies have indicated that brains exposed to cannabis at a young age continue to show some impact to their cognitive functions later in their life. Thankfully, it appears that the effect on young brains is not completely permanent. While young adults see reduced cognitive function during frequent use, the reduction diminishes once they stop consuming the drug.^[10]

I’m a software engineer with a love of learning.

What creates a genius? Is it simply a function of having the right brain patterns, or is there a deeper mechanism at work? Just as savants like Daniel Tammet and Alonso Clemons demonstrate superhuman mastery in certain subjects, there have been people throughout history who gained extraordinary abilities from freak accidents. Unfortunately, genius often comes at a price.

It’s a question that’s puzzled scientists and philosophers alike since the dawn of history.

10. Derek Amato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6gtpU8215U

In 2006, a nightmare became real. Derek Amato, a resident of Denver, Colorado, dove into a pool and struck his head on the shallow bottom. He blacked out and woke up in the hospital, disoriented and terrified. It’s the kind of accident every parent fears, an accident that leaves most paralyzed.

And Derek wasn’t immune to the dangers. His head injury left him with massive hearing loss, chronic headaches, and memory problems that still persist to this day. Yet Derek considers the accident the best thing that’s ever happened to him, because it also turned him into a musical prodigy.

In the days after the accident, Derek began to see moving black and white shapes, a “continuous stream of musical notation” flowing behind his closed eyelids. Even though Derek had never been musically inclined, he suddenly had the ability to sit down at a piano and play intricate pieces that take most people years to perfect. Although he doesn’t understand his ability, he says that he’s grateful for it every day.

9. Jason Padgett

Late one night in 2002, a furniture salesman named Jason Padgett was leaving a bar when he was blindsided by two muggers. They knocked him to the ground and kicked him repeatedly in the head. In the midst of the attack, Padgett saw a blinding white flash, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the concrete, dazed and bleeding, just another victim of a senseless act of violence.

The mugging left Padgett with a severe concussion and weird distortions in his vision. Although he could still see normally, there was now a sheen over everything, like every object had been broken down into lines and shapes. A high school dropout, Padgett didn’t immediately realize that the strange things he was seeing were actually geometric representations of mathematical formulas.

Somehow, his brain injury had given him the ability to, well, see math. When researchers imaged Padgett’s brain and showed him a series of equations, the visual processing centers in his brain lit up. His brain was turning the numbers into pictures. Jason Padgett has since enrolled in college to learn more about his condition and the number theory behind his inexplicable visions.

8. Jon Sarkin

For the first three decades of his life, Jon Sarkin was a normal man in a normal world. He had a wife, a child, and a blossoming career as a chiropractitioner. He played golf and kept up with the stock market. Then, one day, he almost died.

During a round of golf in 1988, Sarkin suffered a debilitating brain hemorrhage. He was rushed to the hospital, where his condition worsened to the point that doctors were forced to surgically remove a portion of his brain. When he woke up, the chiropractor was gone. In its place was an artist.

What started as a series of surreal dreams soon transformed into a compulsion to paint. Sarkin quit his job and took up art full time, splitting his attention between painting and sculpting. It wasn’t long before his art–and his story–gained widespread media attention. Somehow, a tiny snip of the brain had turned Jon Sarkin into a completely different person. Now almost 30 years after the incident, Sarkin still paints, and his works have been featured in galleries all around the world.

7. Leigh Erceg

Leigh Erceg was 49-years-old in 2009 when she fell into a ravine on her Colorado ranch. The accident was catastrophic. She sustained injuries to both her head and her spine, and it looked like she was destined to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Against all expections, Erceg’s spine healed. But her head, now that was a different story.

After the accident, Erceg had no idea who she was. She couldn’t remember her childhood, her mother, or anything about her life before the fall. With the disappearance of her memories, she’d also lost her emotions. Even now, she knows when to smile or laugh but doesn’t entirely understand why she’s doing it.

But almost as if the loss of her past life left a vacant hole to be filled, the accident imbued her with a whole new palette of abilities. In a bizarre combination, she’s taken up art as a way to express her newfound interest in math. When she draws, she says, she’s creating an image based on mathematical equations.

6. Mr. Z

Researchers are still struggling to understand the mechanisms behind the miraculous few who have acquired unexpected abilities from debilitating brain damage, but their lack of knowledge is not from lack of trying. The phenomenon has been recognized for decades, and it doesn’t always lead to happiness.

In the ’80s, a psychologist wrote about his experiences with a patient that he only identified as Mr. Z. When Mr. Z was nine years old, he was shot in the forehead during a home invasion. The bullet completely passed through his head and left the boy partially paralyzed and unable to speak. But while the incident stripped Mr. Z of most forms of logical thought, it left him with a curious ability: He could take apart just about anything and put it together again.

In addition to his mechanical abilities, Mr. Z was able to remember random facts with perfect clarity, such as street names in areas that he’d only visited once. Unfortunately, despite these unusual gifts, Mr. Z continued to struggle with his disabilities well into adult life.

5. Franco Magnani

In the 1960s, an Italian immigrant living in San Francisco began suffering from a strange and sudden illness. Franco Magnani was wracked by fevers that forced him into bed and brought on a state of delirium. While he suffered, he dreamed. He dreamed of his childhood home in Pontito, Italy, which he’d left almost a decade earlier. When he woke up from these episodes, he would paint his dreams, all of them scenes from his childhood.

As it turned out, Magnani was painting perfect, photorealistic snapshots of the village where he grew up, memories which his brain had stored away for years. Somehow, brain damage from his feverish fits–which are now believed to have been a form of epilepsy–had activated something in his brain that allowed him to recall every single detail from these childhood moments.

More than 20 years after Magnani’s illness, a photographer traveled to Pontito and was able to photograph the exact scenes which appeared in Magnani’s paintings.

4. Anthony Cicoria

In 1994, Dr. Anthony Cicoria had just hung up a payphone when a blinding light came out of nowhere, hit the phone, and then rebounded into his face. The impact threw him backward and, by his own account, knocked him out of his body. He remembers looking down at his unconscious self while people rushed over and tried to rescuscitate him. Then, he was slammed back into his body and a world of pain.

He’d just been struck by lightning.

Over the next few months, Anthony Cicoria tried to get back into his normal life, but he felt…strange. He couldn’t seem to focus on work as easily, and his memory was a little spotty. Soon, though, even those problems disappeared, and just when life seemed to have settled, Cicoria was struck again, this time by an insatiable desire to make music.

The desire soon became an obsession. He was hearing music in his dreams, but he didn’t know how to play piano or get the songs out of his head. So the 42-year-old surgeon began teaching himself to play on a borrowed piano, and the more he learned, the more his obsession grew. Every spare moment was spent in music, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched. Even after his wife left him, Cicoria continued to play.

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who studied Cicoria’s condition, believes that the complete change in personality that came over him, along with the newfound gift for music, might have been the result of a temporal-lobe seizure caused by the lightning strike. But even that doesn’t fully explain how such a profound change could have happened.

3. Heather Thompson

In March 2011, Heather Thompson was hit on the head by the rear hatch of her SUV while she was loading groceries. The impact knocked her to the ground and gave her what the doctor’s called “a mild traumatic brain injury.”

It didn’t seem particularly serious, but Thompson never quite felt like herself after that incident. Lights seemed too bright, colors too vivid. She began locking herself in her dark bedroom to escape the overstimulation, abandoning her family and her job as CEO of a local business. She would sleep for most of the day, only for the simplest of tasks to work her back into exhaustion. With a single, careless blow to the head, her life had become a living hell.

Then, a concerned neighbor brought over a set of ragged paintbrushes and suggested she try painting to help her relax. Thompson scoffed at the idea, but gave it a shot…and never stopped. Like Anthony Cicoria and Jon Sarkin, the impact to her head seemed to have jogged her into a completely new personality. Once a driven businesswoman, Thompson divorced her husband, moved out of the city, bought a goat, and took up life as a painter.

In her own words, she’s happier than she’s ever been in her life.

2. Orlando Serrell

It could be said that Orlando Serrell has become the poster boy for acquired savant syndrome. While playing as a boy in 1979, a baseball whacked him on the head. Serrell hit the ground, stunned, and then got up to keep playing ball. He didn’t realize it right away, but his entire life was about to change.

It started with headaches. For days, the 10-year-old boy suffered in silence while his head throbbed with blinding pain. Then, the headaches stopped, and Orlando realized that he could remember everything. He knew what clothes he’d worn, what the weather had been like, and what he’d had for breakfast…for every day of his life.

Besides eidetic memory of the past, the errant baseball had also struck Serrell with the ability to know the future. He’d become a calendar calculator–for any given date, Serrell could instantly calculate the day of the week, even if the date fell hundreds of years in the future. These days, the 10-year-old wunderkind is a 37-year-old man who’s dedicated to helping researchers understand the role brain damage plays in human intelligence.

1. Jim Carollo

When Jim Carollo was 14-years-old, a car accident destroyed his life. His mother was killed in the crash, and Jim lapsed into a coma. Due to the extensive brain injuries he’d suffered, the doctors didn’t think he’d live more than a few weeks.

But against all odds, he did survive. After six weeks, he woke up from the coma and began the long, slow process of physical rehabilitation. Soon, he was able to return to school, and that’s when he realized that he would never be a normal teenager again.

Before the accident, Carollo had had no interest in math; afterward, it came as easily as breathing. Without studying, he aced his high school geometry Mastery test. Then he skipped up to calculus, passing every exam with ease. Memorizing any number was as simple as looking at it. He memorized 200 digits of pi in a little over a day. Beneath every day-to-day activity, numbers were scrolling through Carollo’s head, endless sequences of digits.

Jim Carollo is 39-years-old now, and the numbers are still there. While he went on to build a normal life after the accident, he says that the numbers are calming, like an old friend.