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What is the most peculiar thing about the human brain?

12.06.2025 01:55

What is the most peculiar thing about the human brain?

Lots of mammals get by with tiny brains. Mice having just 71 million neurons can do all the things they need to do to survive.

The mystery becomes even greater when you think about the limitations of our brains. Computer scientists use bits per second to measure the rate at which a computer can handle information. An ordinary USB bus on a laptop computer can handle 30 megabits per second. In contrast, Human beings can understand speech or read text at 45 bits per second or less.

For many other tasks, our brains can only handle around 10 bits per second. That huge brain we have only allows us to keep a handful of items in our working memory at any one time.

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That huge brain we have doesn’t give us strong multitasking abilities. Try listening to someone talk while you are trying to solve math problems. I bet you can’t.

It’s hard to understand why we need such big brains to accomplish the things we do.

Macaque monkeys, having just 7% as many neurons as we do, are smart enough to use stone tools.

Hello, I have a question about astral projection. I started to get interested in this a little while after my mum passed in april. I thought I may be able to see her and speak with her if I managed to achieve astral projection. Since this interest, every time i sleep on my back I go into sleep paralysis. However, I cant progress into astral projection because it is very scary for me as I feel like I'm suffocating when this happens. I panic and force myself to wake up. This only ever happened about once a year before this. It sometimes lasts a long time. This has happened about 3 times per week since my mum died, as mentioned on a previous post. I no longer try to go into it anymore(due to the suffocating feeling), but it still happens. I read that sleep paralysis is the pathway to astral projection. Why has this started to happen so frequently since simply taking an interest in it? Is this connected to the afterlife? I am concerned about it as I now cannot seem to stop this happening. Could it be my mum trying to communicate? Im asking due to more knowledge around this in this group.

My answer is based on an article written by people who are as mystified as I am:

Our brains have 86 billion neurons. Insects manage complicated lives with microscopic brains. Fruit fly brains, for example, have fewer than 200,000 neurons. That’s enough for them to analyze information from their senses, find food and mates, avoid predators, walk, communicate, etc. Fruit flies can navigate in the air, avoiding the many obstacles in their environment and responding to air currents and rain. Human pilots require lots of training to do that.

You might claim that we need gigantic brains for language but songbirds with tiny brains have some of the basic elements of language. The brain of a Blackcap Chickadee, for example, weighs less than a gram and has just 157 million neurons.

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Our brains are slow