Neuroscience For Kids

Treasure Trove of Brain Trivia

A collection of trivia about the brain and nervous system from the archives of the Neuroscience for Kids Newsletter. For more trivia about the brain, see brain facts and figures.

2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998

January, 2010

A. Grammy Award winner Tionne Watkins (T-Boz) of the 1990s singing group TLC had surgery in 2006 to remove a brain tumor. (Source: Herndon, J., Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins fighting to stay alive, People magazine, October 12, 2009)

B. You can walk on a street named Brain Road in the cities of Kings Mountain (North Carolina, USA), Donnelly River (Western Australia, Australia), Witham (England), Moolerr (Victoria, Australia) and Harare (Zimbabwe).

C. As many as 5.3 million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer's disease. (Source)

D. Kim Peek, the man with an incredible memory who inspired the 1988 film Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, died after a heart attack on December 19, 2009. An MRI scan performed on Mr. Peek in 1988 revealed that his brain had a malformed cerebellum and was missing the corpus callosum (the large band of nerve fibers that connect the right and left cerebral hemispheres). (Source: Treffert, D.A. and Christensen, D.D., Inside the mind of a savant, Scientific American, December, 2005)

E. Saint Lucy, also known as Saint Lucia or Saint Lukia, is the patron saint of the blind. (Source: Dhillon, N., Dua, H.S., and Singh, A.D., Br J Ophthalmol, 93:1275, 2009)

February, 2010

A. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, was born on February 3, 1821.

B. February is Age-Related Macular Degeneration/Low Vision Awareness Month and Wise Mental Health Consumer Month.

C. The estimated prevalence of mental disorders in children (8 to 15 years old) in the United States: 8.6% have ADHD; 3.7% have depression; 2.1% have conduct disorder; 0.7% have an anxiety disorder and 0.1% have an eating disorder (anorexia or bulimia). (Source: National Institute of Mental Health, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/science-news/2009/index.shtml)

D. The density of receptor cells in the humpback whale cochlea is 2,600 cells/mm; in humans, the density of receptors cells in the cochlea is 1,000 cells/mm. (Source: Branstetter, B.K. and Mercado III, E., Sound localization by cetaceans, International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 19: 26-61, 2006)

E. Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004, played basketball against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) when they were both high school students in New York. Abdul-Jabbar scored 54 points, Axel scored 2 points. Abdul-Jabbar went on to play basketball at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and in the National Basketball Association (NBA); Axel became a neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner. (Source: Autobiography by Richard Axel at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/axel-autobio.html)

More trivia from other years:

2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998

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