Structure
Neuron
A nerve cell that carries electrical and chemical signals. The human brain has about 86 billion of them.
Brain
The organ that controls thought, movement and many body functions. It holds neurons and other cells in roughly equal numbers.Source: NINDSSource: Azevedo et al., 2009
Structure
How Brain connects
Brain is made of
Brain is an example of
Level of life
Organ
Several tissues combined into a structure with a particular job, such as the heart, a kidney or a leaf.
Studied in
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
Brain Basics: Know Your Brain (opens the original in a new tab)
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. ninds.nih.gov. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH.
ReferenceGovernment sourceEducationalEqual numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain (opens the original in a new tab)
Azevedo FA, Carvalho LR, Grinberg LT, et al. (2009). Journal of Comparative Neurology 513:532-541.
Counted about 86 billion neurons and a similar number of non-neuronal cells in adult male brains.
Peer-reviewedPrimary research