If you are interested in the colors of planets, you may also want to check out the color of plants on other worlds and the planetsâ true colors. Astronomy Cast has episodes on all of the planets, so start with Mercury and listen to all of them.
No, a human couldn't live without a brain because the brain controls everything in your body, so it tells your heart to beat, feet to move, eyes to blink, mouth to open, teeth to chew. If you don't have your brain to tell your heart to beat, your heart cannot pump blood. So your body really can't live.
If you're basing this question on the common urban legend that we only use 10% of our brain, then the answer is no. Both geniuses and normal humans use 100% of their brains. You can't remove 90% of a brain's mass and have a person still work the same way. There is no dead space. Brains are expensive, evolution wouldn't allow such an expensive thing to exist if it could get the same out of something a tenth the cost.