The average human brain now contains roughly a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastic particles — about 50 percent more than brains collected in 2016 — according to a February 2025 study in Nature Medicine, meaning the blood-brain barrier, which evolution spent half a billion years building to keep foreign substances out, has quietly turned out to be transparent to a material humans first manufactured in 1907

Hold a single-use plastic spoon in your hand — the kind that comes with takeout food and gets thrown away after one meal. It weighs about seven grams. According to a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Medicine on 3 February 2025, that approximate mass of plastic is roughly what the average adult human brain now [...] The post The average human brain now contains roughly a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastic particles — about 50 percent more than brains collected in 2016 — according to a F