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posted by martyb on Monday June 11 2018, @02:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the zombie-snack dept.

Even though you use your brain to do a lot of thinking, you probably don't think about your brain that often.

It's an incredibly complex, incredibly precious organ. It's also incredibly squishy, as you can see in an amazing teaching video that demonstrates a freshly removed brain straight from autopsy.

As the neuroanatomist handles the vulnerable blob with the utmost care, it's awe-inspiring to realise that each one of us has a squishy brain just like it - and it contains all our memories and thoughts.

[...] And that's actually one of the purposes of the video - apart from being a teaching material, the university wanted "to stress the vulnerability of the brain to highlight the importance of wearing helmets, seat belts, and taking care of this very precious tissue."

https://www.sciencealert.com/what-human-brain-really-looks-like-video-incredible


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @07:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @07:15AM (#691306)

    I was being Palmer then, and Norris, and dog. I gathered around with the other biomass and watched as Copper cut me open and pulled out my insides. I watched as he dislodged something from behind my eyes: an organ of some kind.

    It was malformed and incomplete, but its essentials were clear enough. It looked like a great wrinkled tumor, like cellular competition gone wild—as though the very processes that defined life had somehow turned against it instead. It was obscenely vascularised; it must have consumed oxygen and nutrients far out of proportion to its mass. I could not see how anything like that could even exist, how it could have reached that size without being outcompeted by more efficient morphologies.

    Nor could I imagine what it did. But then I began to look with new eyes at these offshoots, these biped shapes my own cells had so scrupulously and unthinkingly copied when they reshaped me for this world. Unused to inventory—why catalog body parts that only turn into other things at the slightest provocation?—I really saw, for the first time, that swollen structure atop each body. So much larger than it should be: a bony hemisphere into which a million ganglionic interfaces could fit with room to spare. Every offshoot had one. Each piece of biomass carried one of these huge twisted clots of tissue.

    I realized something else, too: the eyes, the ears of my dead skin had fed into this thing before Copper pulled it free. A massive bundle of fibers ran along the skin's longitudinal axis, right up the middle of the endoskeleton, directly into the dark sticky cavity where the growth had rested. That misshapen structure had been wired into the whole skin, like some kind of somatocognitive interface but vastly more massive. It was almost as if...

    No.

    That was how it worked. That was how these empty skins moved of their own volition, why I'd found no other network to integrate. There it was: not distributed throughout the body but balled up into itself, dark and dense and encysted. I had found the ghost in these machines.

    I felt sick.

    I shared my flesh with thinking cancer.

    Peter Watts, The Things [clarkesworldmagazine.com]

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