God's strangest creation

I had a post all ready for you guys about the larynx and its various structures, but that is going to have to wait a few days.  Breaking news, guys:  I have held one hemisphere of a human brain.  The right hemisphere, to be exact.  And I touched the left hemisphere too.

On Friday after Speech Science class, my professor pulled out a giant tupperware—the size you'd use if you made enough spaghetti for like seven or eight extra people—and opened it to reveal a human brain floating in brownish formaldehyde.  The brain was cut down the middle—remember when I told you guys about the hemispheres of the brain?  And the language centers of the brain?  I got to see what they look like for real.  And then I got to poke them and peek inside.  Don't worry, I was wearing a rubber glove!

The brain is heavier than I expected—it's fairly dense.  And with the meningeal linings (the stiff cling-wrap that keeps the brain matter in the correct shape), it was about as pliant as cooked chicken—but smooth, like silly putty.  It was the meningeal linings that kept the brain from turning into porridge.  Little bits of the outermost meninges were peeling off.  And I got to see a bit of the infamous Circle of Willis!

The human brain, is, in my opinion, pretty much the strangest of God's creations—except maybe the cuttlefish.

As I held the brain in my hand, I was acutely aware that someone's soul used to reside there.  Once upon a time, bajillions of tiny electrochemical processes were happening all the time in that brain as its previous resident went for a jog, held a spatula to flip pancakes in the morning, thought about a story he'd read in the Sunday paper, talked about the weather with his neighbors.  The brain was healthy, so he probably did not suffer any kind of major cognitive decline before he died.  Now it is nothing but a vacant house, its windows dark and its hallways dusty.

We took a tour of the empty house, naming structures that used to be used for memory, balance, emotional regulation, decision-making, moving fingers and toes, reminding the heart to beat and the ribcage to expand.

As we watched our professor pulling bits of the brain apart to show us internal structures, our eyes sent electrical impulses via the optic nerve to the occipital lobes of our brains, where the information somehow appeared as a picture in our minds.  The words he said were just vibrations in the air that moved the tympanic membrane, which in turn moved the bones in the middle ear and eventually was converted into an electrochemical signal in the cochlea, which was sent along a complicated neural path to Wernicke's area.  And somehow the firing of neurons in Wernicke's area turned into words in our minds.  Those words and images seem to be nothing more than electrical impulses in the brain, and yet somehow there is meaning to them in our minds, and somehow we understand—communication!  Just like the words you are reading now.

Consciousness is weird, guys.  Minds are weird.  It would make more sense if our brains were just like electrochemical computers, firing away as we functioned in our environment, unaware that we even exist.  But then God had to make us in His own image and likeness, eh?  Give us minds to make sense of the firing of those neurons, even direct it sometimes.  He gave us intellect.  And beyond that, a soul—while the intellect is prone to the functions of the physical structures of the human brain, the soul is independent.

Alright, now I'm getting way out there.  Somebody pull in my kite string.

With my feet on the ground, I repeat:  yesterday in class, I held a human brain.