• Question: How many brain cells does a human have?

    Asked by to Charli on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Charlotte Flavell

      Charlotte Flavell answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Hi rhiana8,

      Great question! This is something that we scientists have been trying to figure out for a while and the answer, at least for adult men, appears to be about 86 billion – phew – that’s a lot!

      We found this out by getting brains that were donated to science and then mushing them up into a kind of brain soup (yuck). We then took a small amount of the soup and counted how many neurones (brain cells) were in there, then multiplied that number by the amount of brain soup that was left. Glad I didn’t have to do that research 😛

      This is just the number of brain cells that do the “talking”. They are called neurones. These cells connect to other cells to pass messages on. One cell can have thousands of connections. This is currently way more complicated than your computer (for now).

      There are also other “helper cells” in the brain that don’t “talk” themselves, just help the neurones to pass the messages on. These helper cells are called glia. There are thought to be as many as 50 glial cells to every neurone.

      Here is a picture of some brain cells that have been made to glow green so you can see them:

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