have you ever wondered howwoodpeckers avoid brain injury when they peck? they have to peck prettyhard because what they're trying to do is get atlittle bugs and insects beneath the bark of the tree. one theory is that they havea special foam like material between their brainand their skull that's a little like the foamliner in a bicycle helmet. i'm lorna gibson.
i'm a professor of materialsscience and engineering at mit and i study the mechanicalbehavior of foams. i'm also a bird watcher. and so when i heardthat woodpeckers might have some specialfoam like material to protect their brains frominjury i had to look into this. a group of neurologistsin california who study braininjury in humans also were interestedin the woodpeckers
and how they avoidedbrain injury. they got a dead woodpeckerand dissected the head. but unfortunately theydidn't find anything. there is no foam like materialthat protects their brain. at this point i got even moreinterested in the question. how do they protect theirbrains against brain injury we'll look at the mechanicsof it in a minute. but first, let'stake a field trip and look at a few woodpeckers.
[music playing] we're at harvard universityat the museum of comparative zoology. this is one of the great naturalhistory museums of the world. we're in the ornithologydepartment here. and the ornithologydepartment has something like400,000 specimens, representing 80% ofthe birds of the world. they have everythingconnected to birds.
they have mounted specimens. they have drawersfull of specimens. they have skeletons. they have nests. they have eggs. it's really a trulyincredible collection. so we're going to usethe collections here at the museum of comparativezoology to look at woodpeckers and to try and understandhow they avoid brain injury
when they peck. we're going to belooking at things like the skullsof the woodpeckers and then orientation ofthe brain in the skull. and we'll use thisinformation to understand how the woodpeckeravoids brain injury.