Brains! BRAAINSS!

Original entry date: October 23, 2008

Today we dissected sheep brains in class. The zombie girl in me is as happy as a maggot in a heap of rotting flesh.

The first part, however, was odious and made my olfactory sensors cry foul. Maybe it's because brains tend to be fatty, due to the myelin sheath of the white matter, but they smell awful coming out of the formalin filled vacuum sealed bags.

Tyler was absent for all the fun, so I let Andrea do the initial cuts into the brain since she is still somewhat new to the idea of a scalpel and making surgical cuts. She did a mid saggital cut of the brain, through the medulla oblongata, diencephalon, and cerebellum, and we studied the ventricles. When that bit was over, we slapped things back together and I did a coronal cut through the cerebrum, so we could study the cerebral cortex. The contrast of grey vs. white matter was pretty amazing. Jerry did most of the cleanup since it was us girls who hogged up the scalpels.

Before we tossed the brains into the biohazard trash bin, we made sure to look for some key structures: infundibulum, optic nerve, optic chaism, septum pellucidum, corpora quadrigemini, precentral and postcentral gyrus.

The names of anatomical structures roll off the tongue like some melodic foreign language that sounds alien, yet familiar all at the same time. While the majority are named using Latin or Greek verbiage, it still sounds intoxicatingly exotic. When you hear corpora quadrigemini, it doesn't conjure up images of 4 tiny, squished bodies within the brain. Your mind draws images of something Latin: smoldering, smart, and sexy.

But brains are sexy, at least to me, and I don't just mean in the figurative sense. The smell of these little suckers, however, is not.

Afterwards we watched a video that Kevin took from his spring 2006 Bio232 class of a human brain extraction. It was very graphic, and therefore difficult for some in the class to watch. I was fascinated, but at the same time I couldn't help but think just how awful the smell of bone dust in the air would be.

I don't know if we're going to do a brain extraction when I take his Bio232 class in the spring, but I have some horrible sinking feeling that the smells associated with such a procedure will be akin to those inside a dental office, mid root canal. Yuck.

If somebody inhales bone dust, does it make them a cannibal? Or a human huffer, kind of like the punk kids in high school hiding under the bleachers huffing glue? Except this time it's bone dust? I don't think I'd want to be one to find out, even though I try and convince myself that I'm a zombie girl. I guess I could always be a vegan zombie.

Do you know what vegan zombies eat? GRAINS, GRAAINSS!!!

Sometimes, my mind works in strange ways.