Eli5: Almost every cell in our body is able to regenerate. Why are the braincells different?
In: Biology
As others have pointed out, they do regenerate, just with a lot of poorly defined caveats.
The simplest way to think of it is a lot of other places are simple, but the brain is very complex. Your skin is always regenerating, but it’s more or less just a loosely organized layer, whereas the brain is a intricately connected structure. As an analogy, if I said this ball pit needs 50 balls replaced, it would be super easy to just dump in 50 new balls because it doesn’t really matter where they are in the pit. That’s skin or blood or other really regenerative really simply structured tissues. The brain would be like saying 50 wires in my computer are broken, can you replace them all? Sure you could, but it’s going to take way more time to do it so that the final product still works.
Latest Answers