• Question: what is it like looking in someones brain

    Asked by islapopsxox to Natalie on 17 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Natalie Garrett

      Natalie Garrett answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Thanks for the question 🙂

      The truth is, I’ve never had the chance to look into a person’s brain using my microscope. The brains I’ve looked at are from rats and mice, and they’re obviously a lot smaller than a person’s brain (a rat brain is about the size of a walnut). There are quite a few similarities between the brains of mice and humans, though, so what I’ve seen is likely to be the same in a human.

      I think brains are really beautiful. They have a complex structure, with lots of blood vessels going into them (to see how many blood vessels, check out this picture which is of a cast that was made by injecting resin into a dead person’s head:

      These are videos of my own head and brain which I made from MRI images that were taken of my head when I helped out a fellow scientist who needed volunteers for her brain imaging project:

      Isn’t it cool?!

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