Question: What are our brains made of?

Joe Sweeney answered on 10 Mar 2014:

Fat, mainly: about 60% of the brain is fat. One way to think about the brain is as a sheet of wax containing millions of electrical wires: the wax insulates the wires from each other, preventing short circuits and making sure the signals reach the right places at the right times. If you squash this sheet into the smallest volume possible without damaging it, you get the crinkly surface and roughly spherical shape of the brain. You can approximate this at home: if you take a sheet of newspaper (make sure it’s been read first…) and compress it, the result will be a brain-like crinkly oval.