Can one burn calories just by thinking? Well, yes… a little bit.

Abstract

Even at rest, human body requires energy to run basic and vital body function like digestion, breathing and keeping a balanced body temperature. Although the brain counts for only 02% of the body weight, it consumers a whopping 20-25% of all the energy in human body; in the form of glucose. Now that's a big mouth to feed; about 350 to 450 calories per day is consumed by the brain in an average male or female, that is he or she is not involved in intense cognitive processing. That is the sole reason that along with physical growth among children of 5 to 6 years old, cognitive learning and pattern recognition also occurs at a great pace, forcing the brain to consume around 60% of all body energy. The reason this small organ guzzles a lot of energy is that communication between and among the neurons requires a lot of energy provided though Synapses; a cell structure though which the transmission of chemical signal occur. Now, to fire a synapse a great amount of ions is transported though out the membrane, which is considered to be the most energy exhaustive process. It is to be noted that nerve cell do not rest at all, even during sleep, fuel in the form energy is required to transmit signal through nervous system to keep the body function running. To add to the expense, there are cell that service the brain, these cell have energy requirements (glucose) of their own to stay alive and provide the brain with nourishment. So one might ask that engaging in difficult cognitive tasks and putting brain to work would lead to more energy requirement? The answer technically is "Yes". But the meaning of difficult may vary from person to person. Simply put, difficulty means that something the brain cannot solve easily using the previously learned tasks, or if the tasks keep on changing. So learning new things means more energy requirement by the brain, and once the task is learned, the brain no longer requires that amount. The amount of overall energy required by the brain may remain somewhat constant but it can channel an increase amount of blood to its locally active region at a certain time. There is an interesting case of an elite Russian chess player, Anatoly Karpov, who lost about 10 kilograms of weight during his five month competition period. An elite chess player can consume around 6000 calories in a single day due to immense stress, increase heart rate (sweating and intense breathing) and heavy cognitive processing during the game, even though they site as much as eight hours a day. When a body is kept pumped up over a long period of time, the energy demand increases many folds, and if the diet falls short of supplying enough calories the meet the demand, it would lead to weight loss.1 It points put a profoundly important fact that nutrition is always at the core of healthy life style, especially when it comes to learning new things and cognitive endeavors. From this point of view, the students are one who can benefit the most from this piece of information; they are young and constantly engaged in intense cognitive processing, given the prevailing environment of social media and urge to always stay participative online, the boundaries are further being pushed, demanding unique set of cognition and thinking pattern. So after all this time adhering to the colloquial meaning of "Health body, health Mind", we finally understand the anatomical and epistemological meaning of the phrase.