In an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) class I'm taking called the Science of IPNB, our final class consisted of brain dissections. This is my fifth IPNB class and I would say I am officially addicted to learning about the brain! Throughout these classes I have studied the basic anatomy of our brain, some of the major functions of these different locations and how those grow and/or change based on our life experiences. The culmination of actually touching the brain and seeing these areas in a real brain is unreal! I am one of those people who is completely disgusted by blood and organs. I turn my head while watching CSI. If someone is telling me a story about a surgery in their foot, or a pain in their side, within seconds I start to feel pain in that same area. So, it's fair to say that I was a little worried about this brain dissection.
Which is why I was so surprised when I was not phased by it at all! I had no problem touching the brain, with gloves of course, or cutting it, or dissecting it to find the corpus callosum, which is an amazing body of fibers connecting our left and right hemispheres of our brain. It seems impossible that something I held in my hands could perform so many functions. It's this plain gray color, yet it holds memories, emotions, the regulation of our entire body, and on and on. It's pretty beyond comprehension for me. In my life, things that hold information contain words, that I can see, or hear. Or have pictures that I can interpret. You can't read the story of our lives by looking at our brains. So frustrating!
Besides the beautiful corpus callosum, I was shocked by the strength of the 3 layers of tissue covering our brains. It is so precisely fit to our brain and once it comes off it retains the same shape of our brain. It's density is that of a swimming cap, or snake's skin. It's amazing how our brain differs to fit the needs of our lives, they adapt for survival. This sheep had hardly any frontal lobe while it's cerebellum was huge in comparison with the size of the entire brain. The size of the olfactory nerves was amazing as well. If we think about how adaptive the brain is to different species, it's no wonder that it would be adaptive within the species.
So the point is that our brain ROCKS and I am completely obsessed. Stay tuned.
