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Human Anatomy & Physiology

A brain by any other name...

Black and white photographs of a brain of multiple angles. Look at the black-and-white image. Just another brain, right? Other than the fact that you might not be used to looking at pictures of brains too terribly often, it doesn't seem so unique. Two halves. Lots of wrinkles. OK, the image in the bottom right is missing the cerebellum, but other than that... it is just a brain... right? Well, not exactly.

That's Albert Einstein's brain.

General relativity? E = mc²? Hair that looks like he stuck a metal fork into an electrical socket? That Einstein?

Yes. That Einstein. Literal pictures of his brain. (Post-mortem, obviously.)

Each individual person on Earth is a complex universe of coordinating bones, muscles, neurons, fluids, vessels, and tissues. We're all alike enough to be human (even Einstein), but we are also each different. How? Why? What do those commonalities and differences mean for medicine? For psychology? For society? For history?

By itself, the study of human anatomy and physiology is looking at all the individual parts of the body and how they work, alone and in concert. That may be interesting in-and-of itself for some people. However, we are going to take it a step further... together we're not only going to learn about the human body and how it works, but what that means in the larger understanding of other fields, from the medical fields, to psychology, to archaeology and history. The story of humans is inextricably linked to the only way we have to interact with the world, our bodies.

I am excited to explore further with you.

Cheers, Dr. Nelson