Click on the link to read about the bilingual brain and associated cognitive and protective benefits. Boost your brain power, learn a new language! 

Benefits of bilingualism according to the article:

• Agility and speed at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles
• Improved executive function
• Differences in environmental monitoring (bilinguals have a heightened ability to monitor the environment)
• Later onset for dementia and Alzheimer’s 

jtotheizzoe:

Explore The Wellcome Collection’s 360-Degree Brain

This interactive tool (go check it out, it spins and zooms and enfoldulates on their website) is like having a brain in a jar on your shelf to study for anatomy class, but much less creepy and less likely to lead to a misunderstood monster roaming the streets of the local village and terrorizing the dreams of young people everywhere.

(ᔥWellcome Collection)

Also: Explore the brain’s beautiful connectome at Cocktail Party Physics!

This is pretty cool. 

In these ways I am of the opinion that the brain exercises the greatest power in the man. This is the interpreter to us of those things which emanate from the air, when the brain happens to be in a sound state. But the air supplies sense to it. And the eyes, the ears, the tongue and the feet, administer such things as the brain cogitates. For in as much as it is supplied with air, does it impart sense to the body. It is the brain which is the messenger to the understanding. For when the man draws the breath into himself, it passes first to the brain, and thus the air is distributed to the rest of the body, leaving in the brain its acme, and whatever has sense and understanding. For if it passed first to the body and last to the brain, then having left in the flesh and veins the judgment, when it reached the brain it would be hot, and not at all pure, but mixed with the humidity from flesh and blood, so as to be no longer pure.

Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease (Translation by Francis Adams in 1886)

Click on the link for a full read :) Obviously, most of this “knowledge” is rustic, primitive and inaccurate. But, give the man a break! To me it seems like reasonable logic, considering this was written 400 B.C.

milesian:

A healthy human brain (left) compared to the brain of a 90 year old (right) which is only two thirds the size of the young brain. Over time, white matter decreases and the brain shrinks. This gradual shrinkage is most extreme between age 70 and 80. 

(Source: )

fuckyeahneuroscience:

submitted by infinity-imagined:

This video is made from frozen human brain slices.  It begins at the top of the skull and progresses down to the neck.   Visible brain structures include the neocortex, white matter, corpus callosum, striatum, thalamus and cerebellum.  The dark neocortex is intensely folded in order to fit the maximum “area” of this tissue into the volume of the skull.

Source; brainmaps