Kevin D Thompson – Blog

Trivia

• Famous for knowing all the London streets by heart, London taxi drivers have a larger than normal hippocampus, especially the drivers who have been on the job longest. A study of the London taxi drivers suggests that as people memorize more and more information, this part of their brain continues to grow.
• Approximate number of fibers in the human optic nerve = 1,200,000
• There are between 50-75 trillion cells in the adult human body and each cell possesses all of the basic functionality found in the human being.
• According to a Qualtrics study commissioned by Daniel H. Pink, American workers are spending about 40% of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling - persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don't involve anyone making a purchase.
• The capacity for such emotions as joy, happiness, fear, and shyness are already developed at birth. The specific type of nurturing a child receives shapes how these emotions are developed.
• Only about 2% of our people possess a genetic code that makes it impossible to live a "normal" life. The majority of our ailments and pre-mature death in America are the result of diet and behavior. (Thinking is a form of behavior.)
• The largest organ of our body is our skin. It weighs about 8 lbs and covers about 22 square feet of area.
• Your short-term memory is located in your pre-frontal cortex and occupies an area about the size of a postage stamp approximately one inch behind and above your right eye. It is capable of keeping and working with 7 (plus or minus 2) pieces of information at any one time.
• You can’t tickle yourself because your brain distinguishes between unexpected external touch and your own touch.
• The human body contains over 10 times more microbial cells than human cells.
• There are approximately 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.
• There are approximately 70,000 different "protein parts" used in the construction of the cells in the human body.
• According to a study by Bristol-Myers Squibb, accountants have the highest incidence of on-the-job headaches, followed by librarians, then bus and truck drivers.
• Humans shed and re-grow outer skin cells about every 27 days - almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime.
• It is believed that our awareness is focused on approximately 2,000 bits of information per second.
• The human brain weighs about 3 lbs - burns 20% of your daily caloric intake - and is by far the most complex object in the known universe.
• The average number of thoughts that humans are believed to experience each day is 70,000.
• Those who are left-handed or ambidextrous have a corpus collosum (the part of the brain that bridges the two halves) that is about 11% larger than those who are right-handed.
• The human heart pumps about 2,400 gallons of blood per day.
• The typical adult loses approximately 50 - 100 scalp hairs daily. If not cut, scalp hairs can grow up to 5 feet long.
• In a 1993 study by Anders Ericsson, a leading researcher in expert performance and professor at Florida State University, they discovered that 90 minutes was the longest period of time during which their study subjects (world-class violinists) could sustain the highest level of attention.
• A stimulating environment for a child can make the difference between a 25% greater ability to learn or 25% less in an environment with little stimulation.
• It is estimated that the human brain processes 400,000,000,000 (400 billion) bits of information per second.
• The average child in America laughs about 400 times per day - the average adult in America laughs only about 15 times...get your 385 back!
• There are approximately 5 Million hairs on the average adult human body - but only about 100,000 of those are on the scalp.
• Humans continue to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity.
• The fake smile and the genuine smile, also known as the "Duchenne smile", (named after the French physician who studied facial expressions) originate in different parts of the brain.
• The human heart pumps life-sustaining blood through a 60,000-mile-long network of vessels. It beats about 100,000 times a day, 40 million times a year—in total around three billion heartbeats over an average lifetime.