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.

2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 |
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998

January, 2020

A. Neuron EV is the name of an electric car company.

B. Last month, former National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern suffered a brain hemorrhage.

C. Possible neural tissue was found in a 500-million-year-old fossil of an insect-like animal. (Source: Ortega-Hernández, J., Lerosey-Aubril, R. and Pates, S., Proclivity of nervous system preservation in Cambrian Burgess Shale-type deposits, 286. Proc. R. Soc. B., http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2370, published December 11, 2019.)

D. The University of Sheffield (Sheffield, UK) was recently awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for innovation in neuroscience.

E. The muscles used to focus the eye adjust 100,000 times each day. (Source: Goes, F.J., The Eye in History, New Delhi (India): Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers (P) Ltd., 2013.)

February, 2020

A. Singer Taylor Swift has revealed that her mother has been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

B. Nymphoides aquatica is a species of plant found in rivers and lakes in Florida; this plant is also known as the Brain Plant. (Source: https://www.plantsrescue.com/nymphoides-aquatica/)

C. Dr. Seuss had this to say about contagious yawning: "A yawn is quite catching you see. Like a cough. It just takes one yawn to start other yawns off." (Source: Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book, New York: Random House, 1962.)

D. Terry Jones, who passed away last month and was a member of the Monty Python comedy group, had his brain donated to the brain bank at the Institute of Neurology, University College London. (Source: Singh, A., Monty Python frontman Terry Jones donated his brain to dementia research, The Telegraph, January 26, 2020.)

E. The original meaning of the word "hallucinate" was "deceive" from the Latin word "hallucinates" meaning "wander in the mind."

March, 2020

A. Brain Awareness Week is this month: March 16-22, 2020.

B. A large, extinct South American rodent that lived about 10 million years ago weighed 80 kg (176 lb) had a brain that weighed only 47 gm (0.1 lb). (Source: Ferreira, J.D. et al., Small within the largest: brain size and anatomy of the extinct Neoepiblema acreensis, a giant rodent from the Neotropics. Biol. Lett.16:20190914.http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0914).

C. Philanthotoxins are chemicals in the venom of the Egyptian solitary wasp (Philanthus Triangulum). These toxins paralyze the wasp's prey by blocking receptors for acetylcholine and glutamate.

D. Neuroscientist and 2014 Nobel Prize winner (2014) Edvard Moser was born in 1962 on a small island in Norway inhabited with fewer than 500 people. He moved to a larger island that had about 4,000 people in 1963 and lived there until he was 18 years old.

E. 90% of today's medical science terms have their origin in Greek, Latin or Greco-Latin. (Source: Soutis, M., Ancient Greek terminology in pediatric surgery: about the word meaning, J. Pediatr. Surgery, 41:1302-1308, 2006.)

April, 2020

A. The University of Rhode Island will offer a new undergraduate degree in neuroscience, the University of Pennsylvania will change the name of its Biological Basis of Behavior major to the Neuroscience major and Boston College will change the name of its Psychology Department to the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

B. Saint Hubert's Key was a traditional European treatment for rabies. These keys were bars, nails or crosses that were heated and then placed on the wound of an injured person.

C. In the movie "Rocky" (1976), the character Apollo Creed says: "Sports make you grunt and smell. Stay in school, use your brains. Be a thinker, not a stinker."

D. The area of the brain called the pulvinar gets its name from the Latin word for pillow or cushion.

E. John Lilly invented the sensory isolation tank in 1954.

May, 2020

This month's trivia are all from the Winter 2020 issue of CEREBRUM.

A. 10 seconds: time it takes for nicotine to enter the brain after smoking a cigarette.

B. 20%: percentage of people in the US who suffer from anxiety disorders.

C. 200: number of failed Alzheimer's disease drug trials.

D. 400,000: number of people in the world who have brain implants (most are to treat Parkinson's disease).

E. 24 million: number of people in the US who suffer from sleep apnea and don't know it.

June, 2020

All of this month's trivia come from the book "Amazing Arachnids" by Jillian Cowles, Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ), 2018.

A. Spiders cannot blink their eyes. Spider eyes are covered by a thin cuticle that protects the eyes from drying out.

B. Some scorpions have light-sensitive cells in their tails.

C. Wolf spiders communicate with each other by making three types of sound: percussion, vibration and stridulation.

D. Some spiders can travel great distances (more than 2,500 feet) away from their burrows but still find their way back home.

E. Hard ticks have a specialized structure on their first pair of legs called a Haller's organ. Haller's organ is used to detect chemicals, temperature and humidity.

July, 2020

Visit these real places!

A. Eat your favorite frozen treats at Brain Freeze Ice Cream Parlor in Moorestown, New Jersey.

B. Get a book at Brain Lairs Books in South Bend, Indiana.

C. Fishing gear available at Fishbrain, Inc. in Naperville, Illinois.

D. Find toys at Cogs The Brain Shop in Dublin, Ireland.

E. Rest up at Bed & Brains in Frankfurt, Germany.

August, 2020

A. Grant Imahara, a cast member of the "MythBusters" TV show, died last month after suffering from a brain aneurysm.

B. Andrew V. Schally, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries about the production of peptides in the brain, has more than 2200 publications. (Source: Nobel Prize web site, https://www.nobelprize.org/)

C. Rough-skinned newts (Taricha granulosa) have bacteria on their skin that can contain the neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. (Source: Vaelli, P.M., Theis, K.R., Williams, J.E., O'Connell, L.A., Foster, J.A., and Eisthen, H.L., The skin microbiome facilitates adaptive tetrodotoxin production in poisonous newts, eLife 2020;9:e53898 doi: 10.7554/eLife.53898)

D. August is Pain Awareness Month.

E. William Shakespeare, in King Henry VI, part II Act III, scene I, wrote:
"My brain more busy than the labouring spider
Weaves tedious snares to trap mine enemies.

September, 2020

A. One in three (800 million) children around the world have dangerous blood levels of lead, a neurotoxin. (Source: UNICEF)

B. The extinct dodo bird was likely as intelligent as a pigeon. The dodo also had a large olfactory bulb suggesting that the bird had a good sense of smell. (Source: Baptista, F.G. and Healy, P., The Dodo's New Look, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine, August, 2020.)

C. Rattlesnake venom contains a neurotoxin; wearing denim clothing likely reduces the amount of venom injected by rattlesnakes. (Source: Herbert, S.S. and Hayes, W.K. Denim clothing reduces venom expenditure by rattlesnakes striking defensively at model human limbs. Ann Emerg Med., 54:830-836, 2009.)

D. New studies show that that surface area of cerebellar cortex is 1,590 square centimeters. (Source: Sereno et al., The human cerebellum has almost 80% of the surface area of the neocortex, PNAS, 117:19538-19543, 2020.)

E. If you see a word starting with the prefix "encephal-," then the meaning has something to do with the brain because "encephala" comes from the Greek word for "brain."

October, 2020

A. Swans (Cygnus olor; the mute swan) have 23 cervical vertebrae (neck bones); humans have only 7 cervical vertebrae (Source: Bohmer et al., Correlated evolution of neck length and leg length in birds, R. Soc. Open Sci.6181588, http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181588, 2019).

B. Cafe Synapse is a small restaurant on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

C. The box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophorauses) has 24 eyes grouped into four clusters called rhopalia. (Source: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine, February, 2016.)

D. J.Z. Young wrote in Doubt and Certainty in Science. A Biologist's Reflections on the Brain (1960): "The principles now being discovered at work in the brain may provide, in the future, machines even more powerful than those we can at present foresee."

E. Some interesting statistics about bird brains: the grey parrot brain has a mass of 8.8 gm and contains 1.565 billion neurons; the barn owl brain has a mass of 5.6 gm and contains 689.5 million neurons; the emu brain has a mass of 21.8 gm and contains 1.335 billion neurons. (Source: Olkowicza, S., et al., Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain, PNAS, 113: 7255-7260, 2016.)

November, 2020

A. Actor Keanu Reeves played a neuroscientist in the 2018 film titled "Replica."

B. Squid ink contains the neurotransmitter dopamine (Source: Derby, C.D., Cephalopod ink: production, chemistry, functions and applications. Mar Drugs, 12:2700-2730, 2014)

C. The brain of the fruit fly contains about 100,000 neurons (Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, https://www.hhmi.org/news/complete-fly-brain-imaged-at-nanoscale-resolution)

D. Neurosurgeons at the University of California, San Francisco, recently performed brain surgery on a sea lion to control the animal's seizures. (Source: Richtel, M., Brain Surgery for a "Sweet Boy": Saving Cronutt the Sea Lion, New York Times, October 8, 2020)

E. According to US News & World Report (October 20, 2020), the best universities for neuroscience and behavior are: 1) Harvard University, 2) University of California - San Francisco, 3) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 4) Stanford University and 5) University College London. (See all of the rankings here: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/neuroscience-behavior)

December, 2020

A. Diego Maradona, the great soccer player from Argentina, was discharged from the hospital last month after he had successful brain surgery for a subdural hematoma, but unfortunately, he passed away on November 25, 2020, after suffering from cardiac arrest.

B. In 2004, an amateur fossil hunter found something that looked like a small rock. It turned out that the object was the first fossilized dinosaur brain ever discovered. (Source: New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/science/first-fossilized-dinosaur-brain.html).

C. Venomous snakes, including those with neurotoxic venoms, kill about 130,000 people around the world each year. (Source, National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/05/snakebites-neglected-health-crisis-africa/)

D. The superior colliculi and inferior colliculi are two sets of paired structures found on the roof of the midbrain. The superior colliculi (colliculus is singular) are important for processing visual information and the inferior colliculi are important for processing auditory information. The word colliculus comes from the Latin word meaning "little hill" because each colliculus of the brain looks like a little bump.

E. The first formal meeting of The Society of Neurological Surgeons convened in Boston on November 26, 1920.

More trivia from other years:

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

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