Tonight I will be touching a real, live—or rather, dead—human brain.
"Don’t pass out," my roommates say as I leave for class. I roll my eyes as I close the door; every single person I’ve informed about the lab I have this evening for my neuropsychology class has consistently advised me with a smug expression to hold fast to my consciousness.
Why does everyone think I’d pass out? I wonder defensively as I wait outside the laboratory. My resumé of dissections throughout middle and high school is dense with earthworms, fish, frogs, and fetal pigs, and I did just fine each time—in fact, I was usually the one with the scalpel. So what if I passed out when I got my meningitis vaccination before freshman year? So what if I almost had to leave my Drugs and Human Behaviors class junior year when the professor was discussing the anatomy of the needle? Obviously I have a needle phobia, not a fear of organs. I will be just fine.
Head up, I enter the lab, enthusiastically answering my classmate when she asks, "Ready to touch some brains?" I place my bag on the floor, rest my pen, binder, and elbows on the black lab counter, and I wait. I notice that it’s a little morbidly ironic that we are in the Nutrition and Food Science lab. Upon direction, I tie a white plastic disposable apron over my clothes and fit my hands into a pair of blue latex gloves, all of which were plucked from cardboard boxes on the ledge in front of me. Pulling my borrowed rubber lab goggles over my head, I hurry and get a front row position so I can pay close attention.
Three or four human brain specimens, in various states of being sliced and diced, sit in the metal trays behind the professor. The gray-beige color of the brains and their rubbery texture are rather unsurprising—they look exactly like pictures and diagrams I’ve seen before. So far, I am fine. Once the professor reaches for the first tray, the lesson begins. She names regions and systems of the brain and explains their functions, subsequently poking metal pins into each area to create a forest of neon green labels among the hills and valleys of gyri and sulci. I am hardly fazed.
Slowly, as the professor begins to peel back the meninges of an intact brain to identify the three protective membrane layers, a wave of heat creeps up my body. At the same time, a cold sweat washes down; I can feel the cool moisture collecting on the back of my neck. My face is getting so hot that my goggles are actually fogging up. I try rolling up my sleeves and taking big, deep breaths, but I’m practically covered in plastic and the air is saturated with formaldehyde. When black clouds start to permeate my vision, I know I’m in trouble.
To stop the blood from draining, I drop my head and look at the floor and try to think of something—anything—else. Rachel, do not pass out, I command myself. If you do, you are going to hit your head on the counter and die, and there will be an extra brain to observe. Or even worse, you are going to be known to all of these bioscience and psychology majors—all of these strangers—as the wussy girl who couldn’t handle the brain lab. Yelling at myself doesn’t help, so I try to think of something to sing to myself in my head, but I’m tearing songs out of my memory store like clothes out of drawers and nothing is fitting. Finally, "Devil’s Dance Floor," a fast-paced folky Irish pop-punk song by Flogging Molly that I haven’t even heard since my adolescence, emerges from deep within the spinning abyss, and I stare at the floor and sing the chorus over and over again until my body temperature gradually returns to normal.
Crazily enough, after a few minutes I feel like the moment has passed. I am able to completely focus on the lesson, and I actually am fine now. When we are finally allowed to touch, poke, and prod the brains, I step right up to run my gloved fingers over some gyri and get a closer look at the cerebellum. I am not even bothered when one of my classmates says, "It looks exactly like that scene in Hannibal where he eats that guy’s brain, doesn’t it?" I wonder if he will notice the digestive enzyme chart behind him. My classmates and I stare fascinated at someone else’s donated brain until its time to pack up and disperse to our various destinations.
Walking home, I can’t help but wonder about how absolutely complex and mysterious the brain really is. It is the only organ in my body that I need to actually use in order to understand it. Because of the suggestions my brain absorbed from other people all day, I essentially brought on an anxiety attack, but it was also my own brain that prevented me from actually succumbing to it. My brain may control me, but I control it, too. I am my brain, more so than I am any other organ.
Finally, I reach my front door, and as I turn my key in the lock I employ my frontal lobes for a very important decision—will I admit to my roommates that I almost passed out, or will I pretend that everything was no sweat?