Body Worlds

Those of you in the Bay Area: cancel all of your upcoming plans and run, don't walk, to the exhibit of Body Worlds showing at the Tech Museum in San Jose till January 26. Seriously.

And those of you not in the Bay Area, if this exhibit ever comes to your area, GO SEE IT.

It is utterly fascinating. For two-plus hours, I walked around in rapt attention to every detail of this exhibit and marveled over just about everything. Your brain will make 100 new neuron connections from having gone to the exhibit.

These were actual human bodies on exhibit, preserved via plastination. They removed the skin layer, so viewers could see the various inner workings of the human body. There were organs, muscles, nerves, brains, tendons, and all sorts of wonderful things on display. (And I noticed only one glaring grammatical error in one of their displays, whereas the Chagall exhibit at the MoMA a few years back had more than a handful.)

Here are some displays that were especially memorable from the exhibit:
-The contrast between a normal healthy lung and that of a smoker or coal miner- the normal lung was white, whereas the lungs of the smoker and coal miner were black. This should be enough to convince anyone to quit smoking.
-The shrunken brain of someone with Alzheimer's-The brain was about 3/4 the size of a regular brain and looked like a raisin. Unlike the black lung, which is preventable by quitting smoking, there are no proven preventative measures for Alzheimer's.
-The brain of someone who had just suffered a stroke-In this particular cross section of the brain, the area where the blood entered the brain when one of the vessels burst was a black blob.
-The liver of someone who has cirrhosis-It looks like acid has corroded parts of the liver away.
-The dancer figure balanced on one foot-a lot of these statues were in very complex positions, which made me wonder about the process of how they got these bodies plastinated, and moreover, how they got these rigid bodies to balance so perfectly. I mean, they had to move the bodies into their pose (stretching, balancing on one toe, figure skating, back arched, etc.) before they got rigid. Did they get these bodies into their poses and then do the cutting and chiseling away at extraneous parts?
-the "blown apart" man- in this display, every single part of the human body--nerves, blood vessels, organs, bones, tissue--except the skin is separated out so you can see what the human body comprises. It is utterly fascinating. I wish that they had clearer labels so I could identify the mysterious red floating thing that was located roughly in the middle and front part of the body.
-a figure with all blood vessels completely intact

And factoids:
-The brain weighs about 3 pounds.
-The average spleen weighs about 4 ounces, but in a person with leukemia, it is often 2 or 3 times larger from being overworked. (The spleen regulates the amount of blood cells.) In extreme cases, it can weight up to 20 pounds. Can you imagine a spleen that is one-sixth your body weight???
-Children have an extra organ that adults don't have. The organ starts dissolving into surrounding tissue matter around the time of puberty.
-The brain starts to shrink ever-so-gradually around 28 or so.
-When you learn something new, the brain makes a new neuron connection. This information is then stored in the hippocampus.
-The left lung is slightly smaller than the right lung (to make room for the heart).
-This was not mentioned in the exhibit (why not????), but some internet surfing revealed that it can take up to 1500 hours to plastinate one body. Wow. . ..

I'm still processing all of the components of this exhibit almost 12 hours later.
If you go, I strongly recommend bringing along a doctor or a medical student.