LONDON: Like zombies, human beings can’t get enough of brains. A new London exhibition explores that fascination , displaying everything from mummified Egyptian cerebral matter to slices of Albert Einstein’s brain in the story of our quest to understand what’s inside our skulls.
The show at London’s Wellcome Collection asks not what brains have done for us but what, in the name of science, we have done to brains. “Brains have been prepared and weighed and sliced and generally (messed ) about with,” Ken Arnold, the museum’s head of public programs, said on Tuesday.
“This exhibition is, almost contrarily, about the brain, rather than the mind,” he said. “An exhibition about what the brain is, rather than what the brain does.” The gray mass inside our skulls is our exceptional organ, the one that can’t be transplanted, the seat of intellect and personality.
There are plenty of such shocks in “Brains: The Mind as Matter” , a show that puts the brain under a microscope – sometimes literally.
The brain has fascinated and baffled scientists for centuries, ever since medieval Christian and Islamic scholars recognized it as the repository of thought and memory. The exhibition, which opens Thursday and runs to June 17, features mummified, desiccated, galvanized and pickled brains – testament to our sometimes misguided attempts at scientific understanding.
Generations of scientists have extracted and measured brains, to see if they could find the secret of genius – or evil – in the organ’s size and texture. The exhibition includes a range of celebrity brains, including those of 19th-century murderer William Burke and women’s suffrage pioneer Helen Gardiner.
There’s also the left lobe of mathematician Charles Babbage, and two slides carrying pieces of Einstein’s brain, kept by a pathologist and studied by scientists ever since for clues to his genius . That secret remains elusive . Scientists no longer believe that smarter people have bigger brains.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com