one reason for sleep might be toxin removal

brain cells shrink during sleep to open up the gaps between neurons and allow fluid to wash the brain clean.

added 2013-10-17T21:23:35Z by anders

Foerster's Syndrome

there appears to be a part of the brain responsible for puns.

When the surgeon began to manipulate the tumor, affecting those sensitive structures, the (conscious) patient burst into a manic flight of puns. He exhibited typical sound associations, and with every word of the operator broke into a flight of ideas. The sound of one word swiftly echoed in the sound of the next, and all of the words had something to do with knives and butchery.

added 2012-03-29T14:12:03Z by anders

human brain has roughly 6.4e18 nerve impulses per second

“To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*10^18 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,”

added 2012-03-21T11:23:10Z by anders