• Question: when you are a baby if you grow up alongside siblings are you brain cells more developed than someone who grew up as an only child and if so is it because you started to interact with other children at a very young age?

    Asked by ailhep123 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 18 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @ailhep123

      You should definitely become a scientist because that would be a fantastic question to try and answer with research 🙂

      I’m afraid I don’t know the answer, but one of the other scientists may know some research that relates to this. There are lots of studies looking at how different children who grow up with siblings and those that don’t are in their behaviour, but I’m not sure of any looking at their brains.
      One thing to think about would be that changes in the brain don’t always result in changes in a person’s abilities, so even if someone’s brain is more developed or has more neurons that doesn’t mean they will be better at anything than someone with a smaller brain and less neurons.

    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Hi @ailhep123
      Great question!
      I don’t know of any research that has looked in to this question.
      I would guess probably not, that would also suggest that first born children would not have as developed a brain as their younger siblings (and I’m a first born so I feel strongly against that 🙂 )!

      It is possible that interacting with children at an early age would make your brain slightly different, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be more developed.

      Sorry I can’t answer your question but I hope this helps a bit 🙂

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I don’t really know anything specific about this either, but I would have thought that the brain of the child with siblings wouldn’t be better than the brain of the child without – just different. As Tim says, differences in brain structure don’t necessarily easily translate into differences of ability anyway.

      But I do agree that this is a really good question. It would be easy to design an experiment to test the theory, so I think you should definitely think about becoming a scientist to do it! Part of doing that is simply thinking to ask the questions that no-one else has asked yet.

Comments