I went slightly off piste with this one, admittedly... but for the recent issue of Soho House's House magazine I interviewed Jacopo Annese of The Brain Observatory at the University of San Diego, California, about his team's efforts to digitally preserve donated brains in order to extend the realms of knowledge and research into how our old grey matter works. It's still largely a mystery, so the work The Brain Observatory is doing has potential for some groundbreaking discoveries in future. I've always found anatomy absolutely fascinating, so it was a real pleasure to branch out into a bit of (very basic) science writing. Don't be squeamish, it's very interesting...
TEXT:
The Brain Observatory
How one scientific team’s
mission to photograph and analyse the human brain could
unlock the secrets of our creative minds
Stop for a moment to
consider the myriad of cognitive processes you’re currently deploying to read
these words, all that wonderful action going on between your ears. Then, when
you’re done, consider that conventionally, at the end of your life, your brain
will be burned or buried along with the rest of your dead self. It does seem
rather a waste – and whether you believe in an afterlife or not, you can’t take
it with you. Enter Dr Jacopo
Annese, founder of The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San
Diego, who works on the grey matter of a kind array of donors, allowing them to
live on in the digital domain. In a process that takes place over eight months,
Annese and his team pickle, freeze and then slice to a hairs-width each brain,
before dyeing each slice and taking a 1-terabyte sized
detailed digital composite image. There can be up to 2,500 slices in a brain
and, Annese says, ‘once you dive into the high-resolution histological image at
a cellular level, then it becomes an enormous landscape that, despite centuries
of investigations, remains still largely uncharted.’
