• Question: how heavy is a human brain

    Asked by ryanwkd3 to Andrew, Daniel, Hayley, Natalia, Peta on 14 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Andrew Cairns

      Andrew Cairns answered on 13 Nov 2011:

      Before reading, I don’t really know the answer, although I asked a friend who is an experimental psychologist. She says that it depends what you define as ‘the brain’, as the brain and spinal cord are one continuous thing. Also the brain has many different bits (?) like the grey matter and some other things that I didn’t understand….

      In a related fact, Einstein’s brain weighed 1230 grams, less than the average human being (apparently).

    • Photo: Hayley Smith

      Hayley Smith answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      I think I heard somewhere that the average brain is about 1.5kg ish, so a bag and a half of sugar – that seems quite heavy to me!

    • Photo: Daniel Scully

      Daniel Scully answered on 14 Nov 2011:

      I don’t know how heavy our brains are, but I read somewhere (probably wikipedia) that the brains of animals that fly are limited because otherwise they would be weighed down by their brain and would struggle to take off.

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