About this Zone
Your brain is located in your head, protected by your skull, and is the main organ of your central nervous system. All vertebrate and most invertebrate animals have brains (only a few don’t, like jellyfish and starfish). The human brain is made of blood vessels, glial (glue) cells and around 100 billion neurons, which send and receive signals transmitting information around the body.
A chimp’s brain at the Science Museum, London | Image by Gaetan Lee
In this zone, you will meet scientists who are looking at the brains of children, teenagers, adults and elderly people. There is one scientist studying children’s brains to see why some students struggle in school, someone looking at what makes a teenager’s brain different to an adult’s and someone trying to find out whether older people’s brains could be made faster by playing with computers. There is also a scientist trying to understand why nerve cells die when someone has Alzheimer’s disease, and a scientist researching a deadly bug which eats people’s brains!