• Question: Why do you think that the brain is such a hard part of the body to investigate?

    Asked by koosa to Fiona, Jane, Joanna, Michelle, William on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hello again! I think the brain is such a hard part of the body to investigate because it is so complex. There are so many different systems like memory, language, vision, and movement to name a few. Each system is then divided into lots of different sub-systems – like for memory we can have short-term memory (memory for something that happened a few minutes ago) and long-term memory (memory for things that happened 1 year ago). Each sub-system works in a different way and it takes scientists years and years to fully understand them. Then of course there is the issue of how they all work together!

    • Photo: Michelle Murphy

      Michelle Murphy answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hey Koosa
      Great question, thanks. I think it is so hard to investigate the brain because it is so sensitive that we cant do many experiments if the living and there are so many cells, hormones, electrical signals that looking at all the combinations of these will take a long time. It is a really interesting part of the body too as it is connected (in some way) to all the things we do and most diseases that we get.

    • Photo: William Davies

      William Davies answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Good question! There are several reasons – because it is hard to access (hidden under a thick layer of bone and riddled with loads of blood vessels), because it is so complex (about 100 billion neurons, and about 1000 billion other cells) all connected in hundreds of ways, because it’s so different between humans and other animals, and because most of it’s output (behaviour) is not visible and is difficult to record

    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hi Koosa,
      The brain is just so complex in its design-nature did an amazing job-that it is hard to identify how some things work. There is so much to understand about how the cells are connected anatomically, how they talk to other brain areas, how they control everything they do etc in the normal brain, then we still need to know how these things go wrong in diseases, as well as seeing how they change over time. It is a big job!

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