However, there could still be a calorie-burning upshot for people who spend their days performing mentally challenging work. But the calories in those foods would easily outnumber any you’d burn. Drinking Gatorade or gobbling a few jelly beans could replenish your glucose stores and help restore your brain to full power. “You’d run into this depletion effect where you can’t sustain the same level of cognitive performance,” he says. “But we’re talking eight hours of learning a new instrument.”Įven in this hypothetical instrument-learning session, the brain’s ability to stay on task would taper off as its stores of glucose dwindle. “If you were doing something really demanding that uses multiple senses-something like learning to play an instrument-that might get as high as 200 ,” he says. A person doing cognitively challenging work for eight hours would burn about 100 more calories than a person watching TV or daydreaming for the same amount of time, he estimates. McNay agrees that our brains don’t expend a whole lot more energy during tough tasks than during simple ones. In terms of its energy demands, “an individual thought is cheap, but the machinery that makes it cheap is very expensive,” he adds. The bulk of your brain’s energy consumption is put toward sustaining your alertness, monitoring your environment for important information, and managing other “intrinsic” activities. “Calorie-wise it would be very modest,” Raichle says, adding that you would expend more energy pacing back and forth. While the brain burns a lot of energy, any changes in brain activity and energy use during a tough mental task are minute: “maybe a 5% change against the backdrop of all brain activity,” he says.Įven if you were to keep your brain immersed in difficult mental pursuits all day long, this 5% change wouldn’t add up to much. “If we were to put you in a scanner and we looked at what’s going on while in front of the TV or doing a crossword, your brain’s activity would change if we gave you a demanding task, and it would use more energy,” he says.īut if you’re hoping to think yourself slim, Raichle says you’re out of luck. That means during a typical day, a person uses about 320 calories just to think.ĭifferent mental states and tasks can subtly affect the way the brain consumes energy. While the brain represents just 2% of a person’s total body weight, it accounts for 20% of the body’s energy use, Raichle’s research has found. Marcus Raichle, a distinguished professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. “As an energy-consumer, the brain is the most expensive organ we carry around with us,” says Dr. And no part of you demands more energy than your brain. A good-sized chunk- roughly 8% to 15%-goes toward digesting the stuff you swallow, while a much larger portion is required to power your organs and keep you alive and functioning. Unless you’re a professional athlete, most of the energy your body uses doesn’t have much to do with movement or exercise. To put cranial calorie burn in perspective, it helps to understand how your body burns energy. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered.
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