This article is a bit long but I remained interested to the very end. This lady appears to have a handle on life as it now is IMHO.

The BIg Idea


SUSAN GREENFIELD needs little prompting to recall when she first held a human brain in her hand. It was more than 30 years ago, when she was in her late 20s. Back then, she says, she hadn't realised you could study the brain in any meaningful way; it was just there, "a constant presence behind your eyes and between your ears, encased and inaccessible in your skull". How, she pondered, would cutting up a dead brain reveal how it works?
Three decades on she knows a lot more but the brain is still as mysterious as ever, the one part of our bodies that defies explanation. Brains, says Greenfield, as if she were discussing cuts of meat with her local butcher, have the consistency of eggs. Poached? Scrambled? Fried? More like soft-boiled, she says. "It has a form. It doesn't just fall apart like an egg yolk."
She wore surgical gloves because the brain she was about to touch was bathed in formalin. "I don't know if you've ever smelt formalin?" she asks. I confess I have not.

http://www.sundayherald.com/arts/art...262588.0.0.php

paula