Creeptastic weekend with Bodies the Exhibit
This weekend I went to see Bodies the Exhibit, which turned out to be a completely creeptastic way to learn about how the human body works. For about $18/person you can wander through an exhibition of all the various parts of the human body. The method of presentation is really interesting. They use this technique called silicon polymer casting to preserve the actual bodies of people. Basically, you take a person's body (or body parts) and soak it in acetone to remove the water from the tissue. Then you soak it in this silicon stuff which replaces the acetone and hards into a plastic while preserving the exact structure and color.
They start you off gently with a look at the skeletal system, including fascinating looks inside the skull, at the bones of the middle ear, and more. Did you know that your bones are stronger than steel and made up of a cushiony spongy material designed to absorb impacts 400 lbs of stress during normal physical activity?
Then you move on to the skeletal muscle system where they teach you how the muscles connect and interact to get us moving. The dissections here were extremely fascinating as they showed how sometimes the layers of musle pile up on each other to keep things in place and working right. For example, the reason we have so many differet ab muscles is that they are each one is lined up differently to provide the rigidity that keeps our guts inside. Our biggest muscle is in our butt. The tongue is made up of 16 different muscles. According to the sign on the wall, our muscles have a combined strength such that if they could all pull together we'd be able to lift 10 tons.
Next up came the nervous system. We looked at the brain, including some problems like stroke damage and abscesses in the brain. We saw a guy leaning over in Rodin's The Thinker position, with his vertebrae removed so we could see his spine exposed. Interesting tidbit - at the base of the spinal cord the nerves taper together then split off to the lower parts of the body in the shape of a horse's tail. Another interesting tidbit - the reason doctors do spinal taps is that the fluid in the spinal column is the same as the fluid in the brain. The reason they do the tap at the base of the spine near the hips is that as we age past infancy our spinal cord actually draws upwards some and doesn't fill all of the vertebrae at the bottom of the spinal column. The most interesting and creepy exhibit here was the brain, complete with eyes and ocular nerves, spinal cord and all major nerves of the body. It was basically a flat, person shaped web that could look at you. Very creepy.
The circulatory exhibit was fascinating. They managed to inject the polymer stuff into veins and arteries and then dissolve all other surrounding tissues. You could see a complete body's circulatory system, with closeups of the blood vessels of the head and brain, the intestines and kidneys, and more. Did you know that we have someting like 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our body? That's enough to go around the globe several times!
The remainder of the exhibit included the respritory system, endochrine system, the digestive system, the reproductive and urinary systems, and more. I'm not going to go into too much detail but I will leave you with this thought - the human body is a fascinatingly complex machine and even if you don't go to this exhibit you should spend a bit of time learning about what makes you tick. Despite the extremely graphic nature of the material, it is hard to be anything but fascinated. The number of children at the exhibit actually astonished me, but if you take the audio tour, for every audio message for adults focusing on how things work, there is an equivalent message for children telling them why things work and how to keep them working well (like eating your veggies and drinking milk instead of soda).
Highly recommended.