This is your brain...

A few days ago, we started dissecting brains. Ours was in a large plastic bucket underneath the sink in the lab. I brought the bucket to the table and then opened it, releasing the all-too-familiar stench of formaldehyde. Then I reached in and took it out, let it drip for a while, and then put it on a blue cafeteria tray. I took some tweezers and slowly peeled away the membranous covering, revealing every little indentation, gyrus, and fissure. My group worked for an hour, trying to identify different lobes and areas with fair success. Then I put the brain back into its bucket, and scraped all the little pieces we had picked off into the same bucket. This was important because all of these pieces would later be cremated and returned to the original body.

At the time, I didn't think much about it. But later I wondered... Were this person's memories still in there, encoded in the connections between the neurons? What would they think about having perhaps their most intimate organ being poked and probed like this? And how can something so small define all of who we are?