Cavarium, meninges, and brain.

I had the honor of dissecting our cadaver, T.S.'s brain today. The skull had been cut two centimeters up from the orbital fossa and occipital protruberance, and once it was chiseled away and the dura was severed, I was able to hold T.S.'s entire past life in my hands. His most fond memories, his hopes and fears, everything that made him the person he was, was contained in that epiphenomenon, his brain.

No one describes as well, in my opinion, the insanity of how organic matter such as a brain becomes a person's consciousness and projection onto others, as Hofstadter does in A Strange Loop. As I was dissecting, I was learning the anatomy and the physiology but also completely baffled by how they once came together to first sustain life, then spark consciousness, then create an identity that could change and evolve, and finally cross and intermingle with other minds. Just like how a ripple starts out as a drop of water.

These moments in my studies really humble me, when I realize how we will never be able to come close to understanding something so elegantly complex that just happens, without our knowledge or action, effortlessly and naturally.