Question: what is the brain like? is it slimy and gooy? and also why is it that its only half of the brain that works and the other half does nothing:D

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 17 Mar 2010:

I’ve never actually held a real brain in my hand, or seen one up close. I think it probably is a bit slimy, and I know brains have lots of blood vessels all around them which don’t normally appear in the textbook pictures!

It’s not true that only one half of the brain works – that would be a waste of space! All of the brain is pretty much buzzing all the time. You often read in newspapers and books that ‘we only use 10% of our brains’. Not true! However, some bits of the brain are more interested in certain tasks than others, and sometimes this comes down to differences between left and right sides. For example, when we listen to spoken language we tend to see more activation in our MRI scans on the left side of the brain than on the right, but both sides are still involved. A lot of information is transmitted between different parts of the brain too, so it’s not just that one bit does one job and another does a different one – there are a loads of connections between different areas and they all ‘speak’ to each other. Sometimes when people have a stroke that affects language they can have very bad damage on the left side of the brain, and even though the person’s behaviour can be severely affected, it can be the case that the language capabilities that they still have are in some way supported by the less affected right side of the brain.