Brain Tissue facts
While investigating facts about Brain Tissue, I found out little known, but curios details like:
Menstrual stem cells (found in period blood) could be used to create more tissue types than other adult stem cells, including bone, blood vessel, fat, brain, lung, liver, pancreas, & heart. They grow more readily & rapidly than other types of adult stem cells from bone marrow & umbilical cords.
A mysterious nerve disorder that hit some slaughterhouse employees with debilitating symptoms apparently was caused by inhaling a fine mist of pig brain tissue.
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 33 of the best facts about Brain Tissue I managed to collect.
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The human retina is actually brain tissue, you see with an exposed part of your brain.
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The heat from the Vesuvius eruption was so intense, the skulls of those caught in it literally exploded by the pressure of vaporizing brain tissue and boiling blood.
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There is a freshwater parasite called Naegleria fowleri that can enter your brain through your nasal cavity while swimming in freshwater lakes/poorly sanitized pools. The parasite destroys human brain tissue and is over 97% fatal within days.
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Headaches are actually the structures around the brain hurting, not the brain tissue, as the brain has no pain receptors
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John 'Grizzly' Adams, who died after a wound he incurred from fighting his one of his pet grizzlies left his brain tissue exposed. A monkey subsequently bit into the wound, leading to meningitis, and ultimately his death.
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After President Kennedy's autopsy, his brain and all autopsy tissues and materials dissapeared. To this day it's unknown what happened to them.
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The brain-eating amoeba, which lives in fresh water and kills unsuspecting swimmers every year by entering their bodies through the nose and consuming their brain tissue.
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There is a rare tumor, Teratoma, which appears in humans and is capable of producing the tissue types of hair, teeth, bone and complex organs such as eyes and brain-matter, and in rare cases it develops an internal cyst containing a structure that resembles a fetus.
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A man lived a normal life, had a family, and held a white collar job, despite only having a "thin layer" of brain tissue.
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Hearing loss has been shown to be associated with accelerated brain tissue loss. Using an aid to improve hearing has been shown to prevent it.
What is true about brain tissue?
You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.
There is a shortage of brain tissue donations. The brain is not included as an organ donation on IDs, that one must contact a brain bank directly.
Antaoli Bugorski a scientist who was struck in the head by a proton beam from a particle accelerator in 1978. The left half of his face started peeling off days after revealing the path the proton beam had burned through parts of his face, bone and brain tissue. He still alive today. (74) - source
The brain doesn't actually feel pain due to lack of pain receptors. Headaches are caused by receptors in the protective tissue that surrounds the brain. - source
Scientists have developed brain-like tissue from ordinary skin cells to study how brain diseases such as autism and schizophrenia develop.
Alcohol makes cuts burn because it lowers the threshold of our VR1 receptors, which alert the brain when we are exposed to high temperatures. Researchers suspect ethanol may lower the threshold so much around inflamed tissue that your own body temperature kicks off the VR1 receptors. - source
According to research conducted by the University of Pittsburg, obese people have 8% less brain tissue than people of normal weight.
Phineas Gage - A man who survived an iron rod 1.1 m long, 3.2 cm in diameter, weighing 6 kg rocketing through his skull during a blasting accident in 1848. He continued to live a normal life even after much of his frontal lobe was destroyed and fungus colonized his surrounding brain tissue.
Archeologists in Titusville, Fl discovered a 7,000 year old burial site in a pond. Some skulls had intact brain tissue!
Papuans of Papua New Guinea have both neanderthal and denisovan alleles. There were more neanderthal alleles found in genes expressed in the brain, while Denisovan alleles were also found in genes of bone and tissue.
The only way to definitively diagnose Alzheimer's disease is by examining brain tissue from an autopsy or biopsy.
Thinking requires energy in the form of oxygen taken from oxygenated hemoglobin in blood vessels, which changes the magnetic properties of the tissue, which is how an fMRI machine reads brain activity. #neuroeconomics
