Question: How does iternal bleeding work? How do you get a brain tumour? How can you spot a brain tumour? How many nerves are there in the brain (on average)? How is an animals brain different to our brain? Thank you for answering all my questions!

Jen Todd Jones answered on 20 Mar 2013:

Hey haribo!

Internal bleeding happens when a vein or artery wall is damaged and the blood starts leaking into spaces in the body where it shouldn’t be, this is especially bad in the brain where blood can build up and put pressure on the delicate brain tissue 🙁

Brain tumours happen like tumours anywhere else in the body, through spontaneous mutation of cells into unhelpful formats. They multiply and build up causing large chunks of flesh that are not functional and usually have to be removed. You can spot a brain tumour most easily using MRI machines to take pictures of the inside of the brain and they are easily seen as different to brain matter (like here ). But before that you can tell because someone may act strangely depending on where it is in the brain – if the tumour is growing in the movement area of the brain for example then the person will have trouble moving and may go to the doctor to find out why, which is kind of handy!

On average there are 85 billion neurons and each of these has a long thin arm called an axon which communicates with another neuron!

An animal brain is different to ours because it’s usually a lot smoother and a lot smaller, we have lots of folds so that w can fit more brain cells in the space of our skull for better thinking – we also have a frontal lobe above our eyes that other animals don’t have, this helps us plan and coordinate, imagine and use language, and we’re the only ones who can do that!

And it’s not a problem to answer the questions, it’s been so much fun!
Jen 🙂