This year’s British
Science Week had the theme of ‘Journeys’, and Year thought about the journeys
made within us!
According to
the British Science Week website: ‘Our brains control everything we think, feel, say and do.
Inside our brains we have around 80 billion cells called neurons. Luckily, neurons
are tiny, so we can fit them all in — about 30,000 neurons could fit on a
pinhead!
A
neuron connects to lots of other neurons; every second, millions of electrical
signals journey through your brain, passing from neuron to neuron, a bit like a
tiny game of
pass the parcel.
pass the parcel.
When
you learn something new, neurons make new connections. When you remember
something, a signal passes through these connections.
Year
6 used pipe-cleaners to create their own versions of a neuron, based around the
central cell body, with small branches that come out of the cell body and
receive signals, called dendrites.
They added long tails on their cells
called the axon, and this carries electrical signals to the end of the cell.
Finally,
they added more dendrites to the axon. These are the branches that pass connections
onto the next neuron.
