Question: Can Zebrafish regenerate their Brains?

Juan Carlos Lopez-Baez answered on 12 Mar 2014:

Hi @aqua9912

Sorry for the small delay replying to your question 🙂

In fact, zebrafish can regenerate their brains. They have special cells inside their brains called stem cells, that are in charge of creating new brain cells (for example, neurons) if they become damaged or they are lost. These cells are also in charge of the growth and expansion of their brains and it has been shown that, unlike humans, their brains are constantly expanding throughout their lives.

All that said, you should also know that we can also regenerate our brains! We are not as good as zebrafish at doing that and our regeneration seems to be focused on certain parts of the brain only, but we can still do it. That is the reason why, for example, when someone has a stroke, in some cases they can recover in time. The stroke causes them to loose brain cells, but then stem cells inside our brain begin to slowly create new neurons to replace them and, more importantly, these neurons begin to create connections inside our brains. It is these connections (it is said that each neuron in our brains can connect to 10,000 other neurons!) that allow us to think, reason and do our daily tasks.

Do you know that it is estimated that we have 100 billion neurons in our brains? That is 100,000,000,000 (that is quite a hefty amount of neurons in such a small space!)