why don’t woodpeckers get brain damage?
There has to be something that prevents its brain from rattling around in its head and slamming against the skull around it, right? No, there isn’t. The woodpecker’s brain does rattle around in its head and smash into its skull. Yet it still emerges brain-damage-free. There are three special adaptations of a woodpecker that allow this to happen; let’s take a look. 1. Spongy skull bones — while humans have spongy bones mostly on the interior of large bones, woodpeckers’ skulls are extremely spongy. This means they can compress and help absorb the impact of the brain jostling around. It’s like smashing a brain into memory foam instead of into solid bone, and it reduces the force on the brain tremendously. 2. Large surface area — a woodpecker’s brain is tiny. This is actually a positive thing, because the smaller something is, the larger its surface-area-to-volume and surface-area-to-weight ratios are. If something has a bigger surface area, it means that even if the force is large, the p
