Yeah my 6 year old asked me this, Im not sure where she even gets her thinking from, maybe her mom and dad? How do I properly explain this to my child?
In: Biology
Two other ways to approach this question are:
1) the number of nerve cells and connections in the brain is much larger, than the number of nerves outside the brain, so the brain doesn’t more work,
2) the brain uses about 1/2 of the body’s glucose according to this page of the Harvard Medical School webpage. https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/harvard-mahoney-neuroscience-institute/brain-newsletter/and-brain/sugar-and-brain, so from an energy perspective, more work than the nerves.
I’ve five inquisitive children. . . .
Technically your nerves do – because you have nerves everywhere in your body, and your brain is made out of nerves. But not all of your nerves are made out of brain.
I think the best way to describe this is that the brain *is* nerves. And if you think of them as two separate entities, then the brain is pointless without the other nerves, and nerves are pointless without the brain.
Depending on what she meant by the question, there might not be a direct answer to it.
Nerves and brains are made up of cells called neurons. Your brain is a bunch of neurons packed together whereas your nerves are made up of long neurons. The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system whereas anything else is the peripheral nervous system.
Even though nerves may be the one moving your muscles and sensing the environment, you brain is the one that ultimately intiates or interprets these signals. So anything a nerve does the brain probably is involved as well. Peripheral nerves are like the roads the brain uses to send its signals to the rest of the body. What uses more energy, the factory or the trucks? Furthermore there are a LOT more neurons in the brain than in your peripheral nerves because they gotta deal with stuff like memories, decisions, comprehension and other things not involved in muscles or sensation.
Technically, neither does work. Work is defined as force times distance. Since the brain and nerves don’t move anything over a distance they don’t do work. I don’t think this is what you asked for but I love physics.
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