• Question: how does a brain form in a baby

    Asked by waleed to Fiona, Joanna, William on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      The brain forms like the rest of the embryo, once the sperm meets the egg the cells start to divide and differentiate into different parts of the body, Complex chemical signals guide the movement of cells to the correct parts of the body and puts them together in the rright order. Noone knows exactly what tells what cells to move to where and become what but it is the subject of investigation as this could be the way we find how to get stem cells to become a specific cell type if we know what the natural signals that make them are.

    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hello! The brain starts to grow when the baby is just an embryo in the womb. The brain starts out as a blob of cells which grow and multiply and become responsible for different things in the brain. For example, some of these cells will form the language part of the brain and some will form the visual part of the brain.

      So when the baby is born it has a brain but it is very small (about 0.5 kilograms or half a large box of cornflakes). It is very important in the first few years of life to stimulate the brain to help it grow and mature as much as possible – the brain is like a sponge!

      By about three years of age the brain has developed a lot and will produce billions of neurons (cells that pass messages around the brain). The brain continues to develop until adulthood when it weighs about 1.5 kilograms (often more than triple the weight of a newborn baby’s brain).

    • Photo: William Davies

      William Davies answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      it starts off as a simple sheet of cells, then rolls up into a tube (the neural tube). bits of this tube then grow at different rates, with large spaces (ventricles) between them for the cerebrospinal fluid which allows the developing brain to get all its nutrients (glucose, oxygen etc.). about 2 months into pregnancy the baby’s brain looks pretty much like a smaller version of an adult brain.

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