Archive for December 22nd, 2009

More brains!

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

More Henry Molaison brains, even. But this NYT article is mostly about the mechanics of brain sectioning.

The blade peeled off the top layer, rolling it up in slow motion like a slice of pale prosciutto.

Did they really have to say “prosciutto“?

To prepare a brain for dissection, Dr. Annese first freezes it in a formaldehyde and sucrose solution, to about minus 40 degrees Celsius. The freezing in the case of H. M. was done over four hours, a few degrees at a time: the brain, like most things, becomes more brittle when frozen. It can crack.

I think I had one of those sucrose solutions the other day from Sonic, and yes, my brain did feel like it was going to crack.

An entire brain produces some 2,500 slices, and the amount of information in each one, once microscopic detail is added, will fill about a terabyte of computer storage.

Earlier in the article, it states that the slices are 70 microns thick, so that implies the brain is about 6.8 inches from the very top to wherever the researchers are stopping; but it isn’t clear how far down they’re going. Are they going to section just the lobes, include the cerebellum, or go all the way down into the medulla?

It’s kind of neat to think that all of that data can fit on a single $69 hard drive from Fry’s. (I hope they’ve got RAID. And backups. And restores.)