recently, i discovered i had a brain too! i can prove it, just scroll down and check out the images of my brain taken in a ubc hospital's mri lab. i participated in an extremely cool brain research at ubc, in which i was a healthy control for patients with psychosis and schizophrenia (hey, at least that's what they told me!). they did a whole bunch of testing on me (in total approximately 8 hours spread over two days), including hearing and vision tests, memory and spatial task tests, iq-type of tests etc. part of the research was mri scanning which i was especially excited about. i never had a picture of my brain taken in one of those long, freaky tubes. it was so exciting!! at the end the mri technician just gave me a dvd with pictures of my own brain to take home. when i looked at them i thought: "that's just like in biological psychology textbooks.." :-P i mean, seriously, have a look for yourself:
dorsal view (from the top), nice mapping of the cortex, responsible for most human higher functioning. check out all the beautiful gyri (bumps, highlighted in white) and sulci (the valleys)..! this is where all my thoughts and ideas are hiding..!
horizontal view (head cut in half, along the horizontal plane). white matter with all the myelinated axons improving the neural connectivity and gray matter.. also the ventricles are kind of visible in this one.
coronal view (head cut in half along the vertical plane). can you find corpus callosum? this is the brain's organella connecting both hemispheres.. apparently cc is much thicker in female brains, which is one possible explanationation for why women are so much better at mutlitasking..
mid-saggital (dividing two hemispheres in halves), you can clearly locate the limbic system, responsible for emotional regulation on this picture. also you can see midbrain and hindbrain structures (reticular formation, pons, medulla and cerebellum), which are evolutionarily much older than forebrain's cortex. this kind of dissection of the brain is most commonly used, because you can identify quite a lot. i am sure you have seen something similar before.
lateral view (from "outside").
