A magical tour through my brother's brain

Brain stem! Brain stem! Also available in German. Nyah.

This is my little brother:

Aww, look at his grumpy little face, he thinks he's such a badass.

Now unfortunately for all of us, this kid gets headaches, and for a long time we had no idea why. Many tests were conducted to find the cause, but my personal favorites, by far, were the ones that dealt with his brain directly, let's have a look inside his head, shall we?

One of the things that's always bugged me about diagrams of the brain is that most of the pictures I saw as a child had the sections all clearly labeled and colored differently, similar to what can be found on this site from the Nemours foundation. Now, I knew that the brain wasn't multicolored and clearly labeled, however, when I finally got my hands on a real brain (long story)...

Sing it, Picard.

Can YOU tell the difference between the frontal, parietal and occipital lobes? Neither could I, not right away anyway. The whole cerebrum looked like one big squishy smelly mass. The rest of the brain was admittedly easier to separate, physically and conceptually. Fun with knives, yay!

As fun as it was, the one thing that was most useful in learning to differentiate the different parts of the brain, and their various functions was not playing with the thing itself. In contrast to my usual method of learning, wherein I need to touch and interact with something to understand it, the act of simply studying brain scans has been more useful than anything else.

Looking at brains in their all their living wonder, safe inside their bodies, working, the blood surging from one region to the next, it's fascinating. Even in the quiet black and white of a CT scan, this fascinating system shows itself for what it is, not a compilation of separate parts, clearly divided, but as an interconnected system.

That smells really bad when you take it out.

This is where my brother comes in, and so, we now turn our attention inwards for a quick dissection of a still-operational brain.

Ooo facinatin'.

a. Left hemisphere.
b. Right hemisphere.
c. Cerebellum.
e. Brain stem.
f. Cerebrospinal fluid.


a. Thalamus
b. Hypothalamus joins the nervous system to the endocrine system
c. Midbrain. Looks kinda like a hook.
d. Pons. Note how it swells forward a bit.
e. Medulla Oblongata.
f. Brain stem.
g. Pituitary gland. Notice how mushed it looks in comparison to the textbook versions, here location is more important for identification than shape.


a. and b. Lower parts of the frontal lobes.
c. The eye, specifically the vitreous humour.
d. Lens.
e. Sinus cavity.
f. Lower parts of temporal and occipital lobes connected via the corpus collosum.




Bonus: One of my favorite TED Talks; Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight