How a Woodpecker's Tongue Prevents Traumatic Brain Injury and CTE

There are few things I enjoy more than learning about the intricacies of the amazing design features built into the animal kingdom. I think it stems from my childhood desire to be a marine biologist, which is completely ironic given I was living in Kansas at the time thousands of miles from the nearest ocean!

It turns out that I'm not the only one who likes to read about this stuff, as a group of neurosurgeons and researchers from the University of Florida published a paper entitled "Lessons from NATURE: methods for traumatic brain injury prevention" in which they dove into how animals like bighorn sheep, deer, and woodpeckers can engage in acts that involve incredibly high forces to the head on a regular basis with seemingly no negative effects. This paper is a genuinely fascinating read, and you can check it out here.

Perhaps the most amazing example is a creature you're very familiar with (especially if they live outside your home or office), the woodpecker. They slam their beak into trees at an astonishing 18-22 times per second, which creates forces of 1200-1400 g. To put this in perspective, forces sustained to the head during a motor vehicle collision are often 50-100 g!

The woodpecker is able to avoid injury to the brain because of a tongue that would put Gene Simmons to shame.?The tongue of a woodpecker extends posteriorly from the base of the mouth, around the neck, over the occiput, and into the right nostril. This creates a muscular sling inside the head of woodpeckers which limits the sloshing of the brain inside the skull that has been identified as one of the primary causes of TBI.?

Bighorn sheep also have a remarkably effective method to prevent brain injury when they are ramming into one another as part of combat and mating rituals. The ram's horns are hollow, spiral structures composed mainly of keratin. This spiral architecture as well as the make up of the keratin provides ample shock absorption.?

But there's an even more surprising mechanism of TBI prevention in both woodpeckers and bighorn sheep, according to Gregory Myer, director of research in sports medicine at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. Dr. Myer says:

"Bighorn sheep ritually ram their heads into each other and woodpeckers slam their heads against trees thousands of times a day with neither species’ sustaining concussions or even much of a headache, as far as we know. Meanwhile, much lesser forces result in a concussion, or worse, in humans. Our analysis suggests that both woodpeckers’ and bighorns’ brains are naturally protected with mechanisms that slow the return of blood from the head to the body — increasing blood volume that fills their brains’ vascular tree, creating the Bubble Wrap effect.

We have observed that the woodpecker uses muscles to do this, while the sheep has hollow pneumatic horn cores attached to its respiratory system that allow it to re-breathe its air and thus increase carbon dioxide in its bloodstream, expanding its intracranial vascular tree and enhancing the Bubble Wrap effect.

That same bubble wrap effect also appears to lower the incidence of concussions among football players at high altitudes, according to a study by researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. They hypothesized that higher altitudes increased the volume of blood coursing through the brains arteries and veins, mimicking this bubble wrap effect seen in bighorn sheep."

How cool is that?

While we can't help stretch anyone's tongue around their brain to prevent a TBI, or grow a set of horns to shield from trauma, at Ethos Health Group, we can help patients get back on the road to recovery from brain injury while providing objective evidence of TBI using state of the art diagnostic tools like VNG, eye tracking, EEG with event related potentials, and more.