I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
The brain is a really complicated organ, and we still don’t know how everything works. I don’t know very much about brain biology, but I can tell you a few things I have learnt during my time at uni.
The brain is made up of lots of cells called neurons, which send and receive signals to/from the rest of the body. When we are born, our brains aren’t fully developed. As we learn, our brain cells actually change, joining together and becoming even more complex. We also know that if one part of the brain is damaged, another part can learn to do the same job.
When we’re a baby, most of our thoughts would probably be instinctual: eat, sleep, and make lots of noise so your parents know that you need something. As you grow, you learn about your environment, you start to understand body language and eventually sounds and how to talk. Your brain is taking all of the signals being sent by your sense of taste, touch, sight, smell and sound, and developing more and more complicated patterns of neurons, and storing lots of that information. As your brain develops, and you learn more, your thoughts change, you can remember more, and you can keep track of lots more things than when you were younger. Eventually, we start getting old, and our brain cells aren’t as quick as they used to be. Sometimes the complex connections get interrupted, or begin to break apart, and this is when people start having memory trouble.
This is a much bigger topic than what I have written here. There are lots of different things that can stop the brain from growing how it is supposed to. Can you think of a few things that might do that?
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thinking is nothing more than brain cells connecting with each other and sending electrical signals to each other. As a baby, you have a lot of brain cells already, but a lot of the connections haven’t formed yet. When you grow older and learn, that’s when the brain cells start forming hands and legs so they can touch eachother and communicate in a more complex manner. So studying is training your brain to increase the connections between the cells.
Without a brain and thoughts, we wouldn’t be able to live. Our belly will tell our brain it’s empty and needs food, but it’s your though processes which will then help you find or buy food, and eat it!
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