The energy of Joy as Joules and calories

Main energy units

• Joule (J): The SI unit of energy; brain energy use in biophysics and neuroscience is often expressed in joules or joules per second (watts) when talking about power.​

• Calorie / kilocalorie (cal / kcal): In nutrition and whole‑body energy balance, the brain’s daily energy consumption is often given in kilocalories, as part of total dietary energy intake.

Power and metabolic units

• Watt (W): When describing how fast the brain uses energy, power is expressed in watts, which are joules per second; an adult human brain typically uses on the order of tens of watts.​

• Metabolic units: In detailed research, brain energy metabolism can also be expressed in units like micromoles per gram per minute (μmol/g/min) for glucose, oxygen, or ATP usage, which quantify chemical energy turnover in tissue.​

Power Consumption: Brain vs. Mobile Phone

Human Brain

• Average power consumption: ~20 watts (W) ≈ 20 joules per second.

• The brain’s consumption remains high because: it continuously processes signals, maintains ionic gradients, coordinates the internal body state, and supports ongoing consciousness, memory, and prediction.

👉 The brain never goes “offline.” Its “antenna” is always active.

Mobile Phone

• Typical power consumption while idle or background mode: 0.1–0.5 W

• During calling, data transfer, or video: 1–3 W

• Peak when gaming or high brightness: 4–7 W (flagship devices can spike higher)

👉 A smartphone spends most of its time asleep;

Its maximum power draw is still lower than a continuously active brain.

Conclusion:
Even a top smartphone will rarely exceed 7 W, while the brain continuously draws 20 W.

Signaling Efficiency: The Brain as an Antenna

Mobile Device Signals

• Radiate:

  • RF energy in milliwatts (mW)

  • A receiver needs only picowatts to nanowatts

• Antennas are explicitly designed to:

  • detect, filter, amplify, decode, and store external information

Brain Signals

• The brain:

  • maintains electric potential across membranes

  • fires synapses

  • produces electromagnetic oscillations

  • is massively parallel

• Power needed per bit of internal neural computation is astonishingly low:

  • estimated 10⁻¹⁴ joules per synaptic event

  • For comparison, computers are millions of times less efficient

Yet in terms of radiated, broadcast energy to the outside world, the brain is extremely conservative.

The EM fields measured outside the skull are tiny (fT to pT).

Efficiency of Information Processing

Brain

• 10¹⁵ synaptic operations per second (very rough scientific consensus) = 20 watts

• So: 10¹⁴–10¹⁵ operations per joule

Mobile Phone CPU

• 10⁷–10⁸ operations per joule

👉 So, the brain is Millions to billions of times more energy-efficient than silicon.

This is the deepest reason the brain IS a good biological antenna:

• It extracts meaning from extremely weak and noisy signals

• With almost no excess energy

• And integrates huge context from past experience

👉 Phones need towers and amplification.

👉 Brains rely on distributed resonance and learning.​