Blog: William McKnight

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Brain cells and business intelligence

If you agree business intelligence is a brainy activity, read on. The dawn of a new year is a great time to think about the big picture of your career and what some of the macro factors are that affect it.

As widely reported on the internet (i.e., link to wftv.com report), individual brain cells tend to 'recognize' famous people according to a study. The human brain is more efficient than we thought. The research found that some memories, such as those of famous people, events and facts, trigger a surprisingly small number of brain cells. Similar but different memories like an actress and that same actress paired with an actor actually trigger entirely different cells.

While falling short of proving that each memory is contained in a single brain cell, the results are surprising in that memories do not tend to be distributed over large areas of the brain, as we had thought.

So, the more brain cells we can accumulate, the more discrete memories we can accumulate. Studies show that even though we lose brain cells throughout life, neurons can regenerate. How can we do that? According to other research (past blog entry), one answer is to sleep.

Studies done with rats prove that apnea can destroy cells in the hippocampus, which is important for learning and memory. Moderate exercise can also help, as can avoiding high-fat, high-carb diets.

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