Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I’ve been watching a lot of brain dissection videos over the past few weeks.  Ten of them, actually, which works out to around nine hours of slicing, dicing, and pointing under the horror film clarity of a 1980s zoom lens. I should point out that this is for a class, and not the product of a psychotic fixation. My psychotic fixations tend to resolve themselves in comic books, and have yet to involve knives of any kind, thank you for asking, Voice in My Head.

I have learned several things from these videos. First, the brain is striking for its contradictions. Its anatomical crossings and foldings look impossibly precise and ridiculously haphazard at the same time. It’s what the kids today might call a “hot mess.” A hot mess that controls your ability to think, feel, and breathe. Second, anatomy videos involve a lot of pointing and explaining. Luckily, the pointing and explaining are occasionally broken up by the rending of brain matter by means of knife, scalpel, and/or hands. There we are, talking about Heschl’s Gyrus like normal people, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we’re taking a massive knife and cutting the left hemisphere into four or five horizontal slices. The dark thrill of these mercilessly violent dissection techniques gives the viewer more than enough adrenaline to get through the pointing and explaining. Third, man, it would’ve been great to have been an anatomist several hundred years ago. Found something new? Name it whatever you damn well please. That huge vein that runs through the middle of the brain that Galen found? That’s the Great Vein of Galen, which I suppose makes sense. And you’ve got the substantia nigra, so named because it looks substantially blacker than just about anything else in the brain. And then, of course, you’ve got the massa intermedia, in which the anatomist just got lazy and decided to call what he’d found “the stuff in the middle.”

Your brain is like a delicate snowflake that fell from the dark skies of the Zerg homeworld. For the life of me, every time we were shown the brain ventrally (that’s Science for “from the bottom”), I couldn’t stop thinking of the Overmind. “Know that I am the Overmind, the eternal will of the Swarm!” We are Broodax! Etcetera. You get the idea.

The title of this post comes from one of the worst episodes of the original Star Trek, “Spock’s Brain,” in which Spock’s Vulcan brain is forcibly taken hostage by a civilization of scantily clad women. Again, just so we’re clear, it’s just his brain. Spock—demonstrating one of those weird Vulcan abilities that always came up when the writers ran out of ideas—could still communicate with the crew using a mixture of Alien Powers and Future Science, and eventually instructs Dr. McCoy on how to insert his brain back into his own body. Is your mind blown yet? I thought so. This episode seems to be a real life agony booth for everyone involved, conjuring nothing but feelings of regret and discomfort whenever it is mentioned.

If you want more brain-related stumbles, look no further than Buffy: the Vampire Slayer’s fourth season disaster, “Beer Bad.” I will go to my grave secure in the knowledge that I can point to this as the single worst episode of the entire series. Buffy is a college freshman. An upperclassmen has recently given her the old use ‘em and lose ‘em treatment, and so she decides to drown her sorrows with a bit of underage drinking. Her reaction makes sense, because a one night stand is way worse than, say, having to push your one true love into Hell. But hey, that was a year and a half ago, and he totally got his own series, so it’s okay. Anyway, it turns out that Buffy’s not just chugging any old Miller Lite. It’s been bewitched to turn people stupid. Once more: a beer that makes you stupid. Let it sit in your mind for a minute. There’s a crucial difference between a show where magic is normal and an episode where the writing is lazy, and this one helped me learn where that line is. “Beer bad” uses a cheap, literal Psychology 101 setup to deliver an obvious and redundant moral in a way that insults both the characters and the audience.

So, people, don’t mess with your brains.