How We Study the Brain

You obviously don’t keep a count, In my career I’ve looked at over 20,000 brains. The specimen comes in and it’s examined with care, it’s photographed, it’s measured, it’s dissected so that various portions of the brain can be looked at and then actual pieces are prepared so that we can look at them under the microscope with a whole variety of different types of staining procedures so that we can look at specific proteins and cell types. It’s a complicated and expensive operation. But at the end of the day one can really detail the nature of abnormalities present within that brain and can compare it to individuals who have not been, in this example, exposed to military battlefield conditions to try to figure out exactly what’s happening.