Somebody's Everything

       So today I had a lab for Biology 102 at 12:15. I arrived with my binder under my arm and an piece of mint gum between my molars, ready for whatever tedious bookwork Dupriest would throw my way. On my way over to the corner where my partner and I typically sit, I glanced at the various  specimens of flora that Dupriest had prepared. Among the leaves and fungus I noticed a black pan containing something gray and housed in a thick nest of saran-wrap. This bundled up specimen was the only object I could not identify so I causally made my way back to the counter and gazed through the haze of plastic at two, symmetrical grey nuggets, about the size of my fist. As struggled to classify this unfamiliar species of fungus I recalled the ventilated steel casket in the corner of the room and I asked Dupriest "Is this a brain?" she replied "Yes, I don't know why it's out, the neuroscience class was supposed to put it away."

        With that response I leaned in closer and took a better look. Sliced cleanly down the middle, this sample looked close to the diagrams of the prefrontal-cortex that I had seen a time or two in various textbooks. The tissue was long dead, and I could trace a few major veins around until they burrowed further into the cold grey blob. "How exciting, a real human brain!" I thought, returning to my seat. "I could reach out and touch it, I could cut it up some more and look at it under a microscope and see-" That was how far my thought process progressed before I realized, for the second time, that a human brain was sitting on the table behind me.

        This time my thoughts cleared and left my head clear and silent, so thick that I struggled to catch my breath. Suddenly my mind erupted in a cacophony of simple and horrifying truths.

That is a brain.

That was a human.

That was somebodies everything.

The grey blob sitting on the counter behind me was once the source of a person's every thought and emotion. It generated dreams, unique to it's keeper, deciphering reality from possibility and all the while regulating heart rate and blinking eyes. Now wrapped in plastic and sliced in two. If I put that under a microscope, what would I see? The emotions writhed beneath my skin as I forced myself to answer the question. What would I see? Veins, tissue, some fat, grey matter. I would not see a timeline of this person's life, a myriad of colorful memories jostling for attention, a moral disposition, or an identity. 

These truths hit me like a freight train, and I have yet to shake the feelings of terror and awe that they evoked in me.