Brains! Part 2

As may be forever seared in your mind, last week I overshared about the recent excision of a mole on my scalp resembling a little brain, which I did worry might be the site of my concentrated superpowers. I am happy to report, the weather here is fine without my mini-me. I feel smoother but not depleted.

Then I segued into someone else who overvalues his little brain, and talked about you-know-who with an attempt to mind-map his chaotic mental extrusions.

This week, I’d like to tour some of the more important preserved brains which are, post-mortem, contributing to scientific study and/or inspiring/icking visitors all over the globe:

NONPLUSSED CONCUSSED

My hometown of Bristol, CT (home of the doctor who refused to remove my special mole as a child, RIP to both) has a few other claims to fame. ESPN headquarters, that started as a few satellites when I was little and expanded to infiltrate a good chunk of real estate with more buildings and ever bigger dishes and unlimited sporty crewcut guys who talk like broadcasters. Lake Compounce, with the longest continually running wooden roller coaster in the country, which I highly recommend if you like your coasters shaken not stirred. And finally, Aaron Hernandez’s brain.

Wait, what? You know, the deceased football player whose tragic demise is documented in Netflix’s Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. He was a pro star, but not for long, when he was incarcerated for killing three people. When he hung himself in jail at the fateful age of 27, neuroscientists luckily (if you can find the silver linings in this playbook) were able to retrieve his intact brain to study. And here the massive effects of his disease were shown in shocking color slides. In an article from Boston University, who received and sliced this ripe mind:

Aaron Hernandez, a former New England Patriot and convicted murderer who died from suicide in jail in April, suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) to a degree never before seen by BU researchers in such a young person, a University expert in the brain disease said on November 9.

Hernandez, just 27 when he hanged himself with a bedsheet, was riddled with Stage 3 CTE, to a degree that “we’ve never seen…in our 468 brains, except for individuals very much older,” Ann McKee, director of BU’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, told a news conference at the Metcalf Trustee Center. “Individuals with similar gross findings…were at least 46 years old at the time of death.”

CTE, which has four stages, is a progressive illness found in athletes and others who have suffered repeated concussions and other brain trauma. It is associated with dementia, mood changes, and aggression.

“Especially in the frontal lobes, which are very important for decision-making, judgment, and cognition, we could see damage to the inner chambers of the brain,” McKee said as she screened slides showing sections of Hernandez’s brain. “This would be the first case we’ve ever seen of that kind of damage in such a young individual.”

Under the circumstances, it was the best kind of gift.

Hernandez, once a promising tight end with the Patriots, was convicted in 2015 of murdering Odin Lloyd, a friend of his. While in jail, he was accused of a 2012 double murder in Boston. Earlier this year, he was acquitted of those killings, but hung himself in his prison cell shortly after.

“This brain has been one of the most significant contributions to our work,” McKee said, because of Hernandez’s youth and the organ’s pristine condition when it was turned over by the medical examiner. “The integrity of the brain tissue is so well preserved that we’re advancing our understanding of the disease at the submicroscopic level. We’re able to do things in this particular brain that we aren’t always able to do given the condition of a brain when we receive it.”

Helmets do not protect athletes from the jarring head movements associated with CTE, McKee told the conference. “It’s an intrinsic component of football,” she said. “Every time you have a tackle or a collision, you’re going to have these rapid forces affecting the brain.…That’s one of the difficulties of keeping football safe.”

HIVE MIND

Aaron’s precious brain, teaching us so much after his death, but sadly not enough to slow the now Swiftian popularity of American football, got me wondering about what other important minds we might have in jars around the world. (That is, other normal size brains that get to thrive in their after-life as educational tools and artifacts, and aren’t sent away to shrivel in a medical trash bin, sigh.)

In 2011, my favorite Mütter Museum, medical oddities repository in Philadelphia, added to its collection many carpaccio slices of Einstein’s brain, 46 to be exact, embedded in glass slides. They were donated by neuropathologist Lucy Rorke-Adams. She worked at Philadelphia General Hospital, where the brain was taken after Einstein’s death in 1955. Samples were passed from the department chief to a then-student, Allen Steinberg, who then later gifted them to Rorke-Adams in the 1970s since he generously figured she would know more about the brain parts than he would. She found the slides remarkable, as they share on WHYY.org:

Where the rest of us might see blobs of brown, neuropathologist Lucy Rorke-Adams sees beauty.

“The blood vessels are beautiful, the neurons are beautiful, the integrity of the neurons is simply remarkable. It really looks like the brain of a young person,” Rorke-Adams said.

There are no signs of the plaques and tangles–or nerve cell damage–sometimes associated with aging.

Hernandez, because he played the role of concussive battering ram for years, had a brain that at only 27 looked elderly, eroded. Whereas, Einstein, averse to group sports and more of a sailor, pedestrian, and cyclist, kept his brain nimble to his death age of 76. That said, he was a pipe-smoker, which likely caused his “ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm,” but at least his brain remained in fine shape. The brain famous for the mental gymnastics that created the universal unifying equation of E=mc².

I often think the theory of relativity almost proves the idea of some kind of afterlife. If energy and mass, according to UniverseToday, are essentially “two sides of the same coin,” I believe that when, say material decomposes and disappears, it leaves energy behind, nutrients that can grow in turn to a tree, in a sort of reincarnation. The same idea could possibly apply to a ghost taking up where a body left off. (Kindly refer to my short story out now in Tarry mag to explore more on that.) In any case, these brains left behind certainly matter.

By the way, none of these items would fly at the Mütter any more, as they changed their policy, as part of the Postmortem Project, to accept living donations only or a specific request from a deceased person (meaning they asked for this and wrote into their documents while alive). A “living donor” entails the choice was made while alive, not the actual donation! They think Einstein would have objected, and his family actually did, noted Mentalfloss.com, as the brain was sort of snatched away to study by pathologist Thomas Harvey during the autopsy.

Mental Floss continues listing other famous brains, like that of Helen Hamilton Gardener, author and activist, among the Cornell University “Brain Society” basement collection. She “donated her brain intending to prove that women were just as intelligent as men—and that their brains could be just as big.” In 1889, the Society was “devoted to collecting the brains of ‘educated and orderly persons.’ Wilder hoped to show how such brains differed from those of criminals, minorities, the mentally ill, and women. Research showed they didn’t—at least not in ways observable by 19^th-century technology.”

Yale has a brain bank, which I visited during one annual Assembly meeting for class officers and other delegates. Yale’s, as the name suggests, Cushing Center is pretty cushy—vs. the time when the brains were housed in the basement of Harkness Dormitory, and “where breaking in to see them was a ritual among medical students. Today, the brains sit in a well-appointed display that cost $1.5 million to create—a somewhat rare concentration of resources for a brain collection, which these days often stay hidden in storage rooms.” The brains are paired here with before and after photos of the dead patients. Which sounds grim, says one writer, but was actually quite compelling.

In Peru, their Brain Museum features a whooping nearly 3,000 brains,

many of which show the marked effects of Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, tumors, or stokes. One of the star brains belonged to someone who suffered from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, sometimes called “human mad cow disease,” and which has been caused by some tribes eating human brains as part of their funerary practices. (On the other hand, at least one tribe appears to have developed a genetic resistance to the disease thanks to its former brain-eating ways.)

Finally, the last stop of our tour is the Traumatic Brain Injury exhibit at the National Museum of Health and Medicine of Washington, DC.

The exhibit features 30 specimens with a host of brain damage, including hemorrhages, blunt force trauma, and bullet wounds, as well as the surgical tools used to treat said injuries.

Or America’s favorite past time.

Can my little brain have a second life? Could it sprout from the LabCorps trash can into some sort of tree? Do its particles when turned to soot in an incinerator land like dust on some flowers and feed a bee? The world keeps spinning with possibility.