• Question: is it true that the size of your fist scrunched up the same size as your brain?

    Asked by nrtyx to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 18 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi,

      unfortunately this isn’t true. A scrunched up human fist is the same size as an average human heart. Your brain is much bigger and weighs about the same as a bag of sugar 🙂

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      No, the brain is a bit bigger.

      Hello again nrtyx. We had a life-size brain that we were using at the Edinburgh Science festival recently to demonstrate how big a they really are. You can. You can see it on the table in this picture:

      Sci Fest

      Just beyond the computers, there’s a big plastic brain, which is larger than normal and used to show what the different parts of the brain do. Just behind THAT is an exact-size model of an adult brain, next to a smaller model that’s a child’s brain. I needed both hands to hold the adult brain, but could fit the child’s in one.

      The pictures on the left are some of the images that we use to see what’s going on inside people’s heads. That’s also what the guys are looking at in the monitors at the end. The computers in the front are being used to test reaction time, which is one of the tests we due to measure brain function if we can’t look directly. We kept records of everyone who tried the test during the festival, and found that reaction time was fastest for teenagers, but people got slower the older they were.

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