Question: why is our brain so small but its one of the most important things in our lives?

Hannah Brotherton answered on 25 Jun 2013:

Hi 10hareloh,
our brain is small compared to our body…your right! But is is incredible…all the things it can do. why??

Even though our brains can be smaller than other animals like a whale (its pretty big), we have lots of folds and ridges and details in our brain. This is why more and more information is kept and stored and processed. So a horse brain is probably the same size as ours, but it is simpler and doesn’t have many fold. This is because a horse just needs to do the basics in life, like live, breathe, eat and find a mate.

But by chance and evolution, humans have been able to evolve. The most important things our brains have given us is our personalities. The front part of brain is so much more developed than animals, that we have learnt to be different from each other. That is why we love different things, we have different jobs…….by being different we have been able to create a world so advanced.

Without the brain being so folded and complex, we wouldn’t be able to speak languages, think, dream, create things….be everything a human is…
This is all because we have more folds in our brain – we usually think of wrinkly things as being old, but the brain is soooo wrinkly and this is important in why we are humans.

Also the brain is fully of electricity and can heal itself. This is because it doesn’t act like the other parts of our bodies.
I’m a brain scientist and I love how complicated and little we know about the brain. We know a lot about other parts of our bodies like the heart, lungs, but we know much less about the brain – because in those folds and wrinkles there is so much stuff we can’t get to and investigate. The brain is only ‘small’ so we can fit it into our heads lol

The size of the brain – if we unfolded it would be bigger than a large pillow – thats pretty big for something we can fit into our little skulls 😛

😀