By Joe Bridgeman

The day had finally come.  After two years of being a neuroscience major, I finally got my hands on an actual brain for the first time.

Being a neuroscience major means taking lots of prerequisite classes when you first start out to prepare you for the harder and actually fun neuroscience classes later on in your Baylor career.  Having just become a junior this semester, I was very excited to take my first true step in neuroscience – a class called “Clinical Neuroscience.”

At the onset, I wasn’t even aware that I would get to handle brains in the lab portion of this class, and it was a great surprise to learn that every student would get their very own sheep brain to hold, observe, prepare and dissect throughout the semester.  Not only do we get to handle brains, but we each get our own one!  How luxurious!

The first two weeks of lab were composed solely of lecture material.  Same old, same old.  But week three held the promise of receiving our sheep brains.  Finally, that week came, and I was ecstatic.

The class’ sheep brains came together in a giant white bucket full of formaldehyde (a preservative agent), water and brain goop.  The whole class lined up, and our teacher plopped a brain down into our hands without any pomp or circumstance.  I found it odd how “normal” this seemed – just a bucket of brains and a friendly, “Here’s your brain!” as this wet, gross-looking organ is sloped down into your hands.

We spent the first class period painstakingly peeling off the outer layers of the brain (called the dura and pia mater, if you’re curious), so we could get a better look at everything.  The next week’s task was to slice the brain in half (called a mid-sagittal cut) with a giant kitchen knife, so we could look at the insides.  Once again, I was amused by the apparent savageness of how we were treating these brains…with a kitchen knife!  But, it got the job done, and I even was able to snap a quick picture of it while no one was looking. 

It is always a great moment when you get to go hands-on with the subject of your major.

Whether it’s a business internship, a musical performance, or a brain dissection – it’s when your learning experience moves out of the book-learning atmosphere of the classroom to a more tangible real-life application that learning gets really exciting.