Cool.....But not for the Faint of Heart
Mind Hacks has a link to a dissection of a brain.
Yeah...a little tough to watch at some parts, but very informative if you can hack it, as it were.
Yeah...a little tough to watch at some parts, but very informative if you can hack it, as it were.
posted by Interverbal at 12:19 PM
9 Comments:
I shoulda heeded your warning! There's now a whole list of foods I'll never be able to eat again.
oh eeew, ohhh, eeeeeew oooo oh.(covers face, almost starts crying) I did a few sheeps brains and eye balls... oh... this is very icky. You can see his face. I don't see how doctors can do this... but I know that it's important, but oh... my. I've seen lots of photographs of human brains, but never like this.
Thanks, Interverbal. I think this is good if people are mature/respectful/strong stomached enough for it.
I expected something a lot worse after the last couple of comments.
I did handle a human brain once, but only after it had been preserved awhile, not while it was attached to anyone.
Seeing it taken out like that was a little weird, but not as bad as I thought. (At least not yet. I have no idea if these images will come back and bite me later, sometimes images do that. But I had no immediate strong reaction other than being slightly weirded out.)
One thing I found amazing was when we were cutting up sheep brains we were sloppy. It was hard to keep neat edges on stuff. You think about surgery and how clean the cuts are supposed to be (maybe they are perfectly clean, but that autopsied body went from body to chopped-to-bits looking (I almost compared to to something familar and edible, but thought better of it)very quickly. When you cut through certain structures you make them unrecognizable, so I guess you'd have to look at a few cadavers like that to imagine what gets ruined by the cutting. Wouldn't you have nightmares if you were that guy???? I'm glad there are people who aren't thoroughly grossed out by that. My sister (not autistic) is one who can take that sort of stuff in stride.
Yeah, I kept thinking they had to have used more than one cadaver or something given the way things were presented.
I'm not sure if I'd have been able to handle being in the room, given the potential smells of parts of that, but my mom's an RT and often told operating-room stories (I can still remember "And the guy didn't listen to us about not eating, so he vomited in the incision, and then...") at the dinner table so I'm kind of immune to a lot of gross stuff.
Oh, wanted to add, the weird part, as brains always are to me, was sitting there thinking "...and some guy used that his entire life to think with, and now that guy's sitting there taking it apart and showing us the structures, but when that thing was alive, that was where all his thoughts and memories and stuff were."
Yeah, I was thinking that too, the difference between a brain with thoughts and a brain that is a piece of "dead meat."
Back to autism, many scientists seem to see us through a lens of person who sees brains as potentially dissectible as only technically not-yet dead meat.
We had an incident here where this guy was a technician dealing with body parts used by anatomy students that were being managed by UCD Medical Center. He snuck a bunch of body parts of different people home. Eventually, he put them in a trash can near his home (a tacky little trailer park, to be stereotypical) and someone reported it to the police. It wasn't hard to figure out how the body parts got there... anyway, I don't know if they ever figured out what they guy thought he was doing, but it seemed to me that after you see a human leg or finger, severed from a cadaver a few hundred times it would be hard to think of how other people see them, as something like sacred and in need of a burial... which reminds me. Did this old man (seemingly) whose brain they were cutting up ever get a burial? Do you suppose he was homeless, or a professor who donated his body to science? Would you want to know his name if you were dissecting him?
I used to know a guy who worked in the cadaver room (whatever it's called) at a university, and he said that they got a lot of cadavers of institutionalized developmentally disabled people, and that they could always tell on sight which ones those were, something about the look of neglect.
I guess they would be the part of the missing hidden horde? :-(
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