This Is Your Brain...Really

This Is Your Brain...Really

   To begin, jump right away to the next paragraph if you're at all squeamish, for although Kathy Reichs is a novelist, she is also a forensic anthropologist (one of only 84 so certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology) and as such, has no qualms about describing such otherwise gruesome things as digging through dead bodies or performing an autopsy...it's what she and many others do.  But reading about such procedures, or hearing about them, is not for everyone; but in this case, I thought you might want this bit of insight into that tiny 3-pound mass inside your head that runs the world around you...what you see and feel, what you think, what you imagine, what you do.  All of it.  Ready? (this is your final warning to skip down and avoid the graphic description that follows)  This from Kathy Reichs' recent book, Speaking in Bones: ...a U-shaped cut is made across the crown of the head, from ear to ear.   The scalp is pulled down over the face in front and the neck in back...Then a handheld surgical saw is revved up.  A removable cap is created, asymmetrical to avoid slippage when the skull is reassembled and the scalp stitched back together.  The cap is detached with a tug and a slurping suck, revealing the dura mater, a thick membrane encasing the brain...Though "gray matter" gets all the press, the brain's outer surface is actually white and laced with the grainy arachnoid and pia maters...Next, fingers are inserted under the open brow, the frontal lobes are hooked and lifted, and the nerves and vessels leading to the face are snipped.  The tentorium celebrelli, the shelf of dura mater that protects the celebellum and brain stem, the "reptile brain," is severed.  Using a scalpel long enough to reach the base of the skull, the spinal cord is cut, and the brain is slipped free...The brain is placed in a formaldehyde solution, where, over the next two weeks, its consistency changes from Jell-O to cheese.

   Clinical, to say the least.  And this came right on the heels of the new memoir/tragedy/cookbook, Stir (yes, an odd combination but author Jessica Fechtor swears that it was the memory and salvation of food that brought her back from a brain aneurysm: I was running on the treadmill, when I felt a painless click in my head.  There was an odd trickling sensation along my skull like a rolling bead of sweat, but on the inside.  Then the room went gray and the earth sucked me down.  I knew I was about to faint.  The red stop button seemed suddenly faar away.  I swiped at it, but there was no time to step off the machine.  Someone says I hit my head on the way down...Here's what the doctors told her: An aneurysm.  A tiny, misshapen estuary where blood had pooled along the weakened wall of a vessel until, one morning on a treadmill, it popped.  Dr. Tranmer explained that there are two different kinds.  The first is called a berry aneurysm.  It's round, like a berry, ballooning outward from the blood vessel through a thin "stem."  With a berry aneurysm, you can sometimes avoid open-brain surgery and instead fill it with platinum coils.  The surgeon snakes a catheter through your groin up into your brain and places the coils through it from outside your body.  The other kind, a fusiform aneurysm, is shaped more like a bean.  It lies lower and flatter against the vessel and connects along its entire length.  Without a stem to keep the coils from just falling out, fusiform aneurysms need to be clipped.  And the only way to do this is to cut open your head.  I had the second kind.
   
   After the last posting of working in tiny areas, this somehow struck me...as difficult as it is to penetrate the blood-brain barrier (and thankfully so), blood does have to reach there, and now imagine inserting a coil from below your hips and having it enter in exactly the place you want it to enter...in the brain.  My dad had something similar, an aneurysm, but not in his brain.  He did have stents put into his heart, however, the doctor telling me that one of his carotid arteries was completely blocked, the other with an opening of the size of a piece of thread.  Not to worry, he added (my face was puzzled at how one could function with blood being forced through so small an opening), new vessels had already made a path naturally, diverting most of the flow around the blockages (I didn't realize that the two carotid arteries branch off into two internal arteries in the front and two external arteries in the back).  In my dad's case, the blocked portion was helped along with a detour of sorts, a new vessel keeping the traffic flowing, so to speak.

   Our brains are fascinating pieces of machinery, if one puts it into such mundane terms.  And there are all sorts of things that we are discovering.  A glimpse of these comes from one of many TED talks, this particular one (viewed over 3 million times since first shown in 2007) by neurologist VS Ramachandran:  Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space.  It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.  And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we'll understand how that happens...OK, so how do you study this mysterious organ?  I mean, you have 100 billion nerve cells, little wisps of protoplasm, interacting with each other, and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness.  How does this happen?  Well, there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain.  One approach, the one we use mainly, is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain, where there's been a genetic change in a small region of the brain.  What then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities, a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability.  What you get is a highly selective loss of one function, with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function.  So you can then map function onto structure, and then find out what the circuitry's doing to generate that particular function.  So that's what we're trying to do...(one) example is an extraordinary syndrome called Capgras syndrome.  If you look at the first slide there, that's the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, parietal lobes, OK -- the lobes that constitute the brain.  And if you look, tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes -- you can't see it there -- is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus (remember the two types of aneurysms, one being the fusiform?).  And that's been called the face area in the brain, because when it's damaged, you can no longer recognize people's faces.  You can still recognize them from their voice and say, "Oh yeah, that's Joe," but you can't look at their face and know who it is, right?  You can't even recognize yourself in the mirror.  I mean, you know it's you because you wink and it winks, and you know it's a mirror, but you don't really recognize yourself as yourself.

   Tiny now becomes a relative word.  We might use tiny instruments to reach tiny places; but oncee inside our brains, we realize that tiny takes on an entire new meaning.  A tiny change, a tiny alteration and our entire world changes.  We could be running on a treadmill or bump into a low-hanging tree limb; we could stare in wonder at a newborn or question why our parents are repeating that question.  The more we delve into our self-awareness, and our brains that run it all, the more our jaw should drop at how delicate and how miraculous everything is that works, particularly within us.  Three pounds of jelly turning into cheese, and before it, the universe and beyond.