Balun Stormhands

Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).

And that's how much energy it's using at rest.

That's the baseline.

So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.

Trying to think of an even more extreme version of this and now I am wondering if any media has a creature with an epitaph instead of a first name and a surname. “The Beast who Devours in Darkness” Smith does have a certain ring to it.

Amanda Seyfried "didn't even know" what Lin-Manuel Miranda's new movie was — but she said "yes" immediately, simply to get the opportunity to work with him.

On April 16, Seyfried, 40, walked the red carpet at the 2026 Tiffany & Co. Blue Book Gala, where she chatted with PEOPLE exclusively about her next project: Miranda's musical film Octet.

"I didn't even know what it was exactly," she said. "I just knew that Lin-Manuel Miranda was making a new project and he was directing a new movie, and it was a musical. ... I did meet with him. I mean, I'd met him before, you know, around town, but I met with him specifically for this project. I was like, 'I don't care what it is. I'm in.' And he said, 'Let me just explain it to you.' "

"But it's a cappella, and I'm a born singer," she added. "It's what I love to do. It's what makes me happy, and to do it for work is absolutely better than I could have ever hoped, so I'm in it right now. We're in it right now, and some of the best moments of my life have just happened this week."

Since rehearsals for Octet kicked off — as revealed by Miranda in an April 14 Instagram post — Seyfried has developed a close bond with her fellow cast and crew.

"Every single person is wonderful and fun and wants to be there," she told PEOPLE at the Tiffany event. "And when you have a group of people who just really love what they do and wanna be there no matter where they're from or what they do or how old they are, it doesn't matter. It's just like we're all in the same place, breathing the same air and loving the same music with Lin, and it's great."