The brain is pretty impressive. It does all kinds of neat things for us throughout the day and into the hours that we’re asleep. It keeps our hearts beating, it lets us know when we’re touching things that will burn us, and it helps us to weigh the pros and cons of major life decisions.
While those examples just scratch the surface of the incredible things that our brains are capable of on any given afternoon, it goes without saying that we take our brains for granted when we’re multitasking at the office or enjoying a night downtown. Shouldn’t we sometimes stop and reflect on all of the cool things our brains can do?
If you’re feeling down today or generally need to slow your life down and appreciate the little things, try reading through this brief list of things our brains do for us. It might help you feel a little more grateful or a little more relaxed – after all, your brain has you covered.
1. Recognizing Faces.
Every day, we greet people we know from across the room and enjoy photos of friends on social media. We can recognize a client during a happy hour outing and know what to ask him about his circumstances since the last meeting – all before he even speaks. You can tell people apart just by looking at them thanks to the fusiform face area. Some people are unable to recognize a person simply by looking at a face. Instead, context clues like size of the body, style of clothing, or distinct vocal pattern is what takes a person from misrecognition to, “Oh, that’s Sally!” Having a functioning ability to identify a person just by sight is pretty handy.
2. Remembering A Conversation While It’s Happening.
There are times when we all space out during a conversation and miss the last few seconds of chatter. It can be embarrassing, sure, but it’s not the norm when it comes to engaging in a discussion. You are probably able to carry on a conversation for many minutes, or even hours, and still remember what has been said from one sentence to the next and recall it accurately more or less a few days later. For people with some kinds of amnesia, remembering anything after the amnesia sets in can be difficult. Some people are even unable to remember what happened just seconds in the past. You can imagine that the confusion and frustration relating to that would make life incredibly difficult to navigate. Thank goodness so many of us have healthy memory centers!
3. Adapting To Substances.
Our brains help our bodies to maintain equilibrium on many fronts. When we frequently ingest something that messes with our neutral state, like alcohol, our bodies adapt by changing things up to take care of those substances more quickly the next time they show up in our systems. When we reduce our intake, the body goes back to normal. If our bodies didn’t adapt so seamlessly, it would be easier to overdose or shock the body with every day mishaps. Additionally, our body can predict our actions based on our habits and surroundings. If you always have coffee in the morning, your body can actually fight the alertness that the caffeine will cause by prepping your body to be drowsier as you walk to the kitchen. That way, when you drink your coffee, you’re less likely to get more alert than your physical baseline. This is why drug addicts that change up their routines (use a different color needle or otherwise miss the trigger that warns the body what is coming) can overdose on the same dosage they would normally use. The body didn’t have time for that second level of preparation. Upon reflection, we’re lucky we have any of these defenses!
4. Judging Depth.
Whether it’s just realizing that we still have one more step on the staircase or we are at the edge of a cliff, being able to perceive depth is kind of a big deal. If you weren’t able to sense a drop, you might not have such a fear of heights but you’d be stuck with worse consequences like injury or death. The brain judges these kinds of differences in distance and size through cool visual cues, like the degree of lens’ bulge on the eyeball or the tension the eyes experience as they turn inward to focus on an object. There are also the tips and tricks that we pick up on as we experience different settings throughout life, like shadows and comparison against nearby objects. Understanding our world as 3-D when we can only really see it as 2-D is pretty remarkable and makes our lives easier each and every day.
