• Question: What is the most important organ?

    Asked by brandongreen999 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by natalie789, nadiafrenchx.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @brandon

      I am biased but I would definitely say the brain 🙂
      It controls pretty much all the other organs, so they’re pretty useless without it 🙂

      Thanks for the question!

    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @brandongreen999

      I’m bias like Suzi and I would definitely say the brain is the most important organ – sending electrical messages to other parts of the body. Although some messages are sent by hormones that are produced by ‘glands’ in the body, these messages take a lot longer to get around the body than the electrical signals sent by the brain.

      Having said all that I think we would look pretty silly without skin – and skin protects all our other organs.

      It’s a tough choice to make 🙂

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      I’d say the brain – and not only because this is the Brain Zone! I don’t really know much about biology, but I think it’s true that the brain controls all the other organs – so there’s a bit of it, very deeply buried and not affected by thought, that tells you to breathe, tells your heart to beat and so on. That means that, without the brain, your other organs wouldn’t work!

      But notice that I’m not saying you could do without your other organs. You couldn’t! Imagine just being a brain in a bowl. There’s actually a Roald Dahl story about that (in Tales of the Unexpected, not one of his children’s ones!) – where a doctor works out a way to allow brains to survive outside the body, and his friend lets him do that with his brain when he dies. The friend whose brain survives has an absolutely horrible ‘life’ because, being just a brain with an eye attached, he can’t do anything!

      It’s also interesting to think about this in terms of transplants. If you have a heart transplant, you are still you, and the same for almost any other organ – but the brain is where the mind is. So, if you (theoretically – I don’t think this is possible!) take a brain out of Body A and put it in Body B, has Body B had a brain transplant, or has the brain had a body transplant? If you think of a human being as a set of parts, and you replace one of those parts when you have a transplant, then maybe you have to have some sort of central thing that unifies those parts and makes them a set – this is maybe what we call the ‘mind’. But it comes from the brain, so, if you take the brain out of the body, are the other parts left in the body still a ‘set’ that you can replace something into? This is not science any more: it’s philosophy; but it’s interesting to think about!

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