Brain Awareness Week 2012

Welcome to Brain Development

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In today's demonstration we will be looking at how the brain develops from a simple tube into the complex folded structure you will be seeing (and using) today. This animation shows a real human adult brain being "sliced", the cortex (grey matter) is on the outside.

Here is Human Development

Here is how the human nervous system grows

Week 3	Week 4 to 5	Week 5	Week 8	Week 13 to 21	Adult Human
Neural Plate	Neural Tube	Simple Tube	Central Nervous	Fetal Brain	Brain Slices

Here is a developing mouse nervous system

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This movie shows a mouse 11.5 days old. (Mouse development takes 21 days) Red - brain Blue - heart Brown - liver

Mouse E11.5

It begins as a Plate

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This embryo is the whole human embryo at just 3 weeks after fertilisation. the entire nervous system will form from the flat region shown in blue. this is called the NEURAL PLATE. the broad blue region at the top will form the brain. the narrow blue region at the bottom will form the spinal cord.

That folds to a Tube

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The human embryo is now 4 weeks old and sits on top of a big yolk sac. the neural plate is shown on the embryo back. the plate now folds to form a hollow NEURAL TUBE

The tube then Closes at each End

Why are these important?

The brain end of the tube forms 3 Vesicles

The tube expands at the brain end to form three vesicle (sac or bubble) regions.

Fetal brain growth

This shows the growth of the brain and the fluid-filled space within the brain (the red bar is 1 cm).

• The brain goes from having a smooth surface to begin to fold or "wrinkle".
• The fluid space is filled with cerebral-spinal fluid or CSF.