New York Diary

Fabulous Complexity

Last weekend, relatives came to town and we went to the Bodies Exhibition at South Street Seaport. Let me tell you, folks: this was nothing short of awesome.

The exhibit was well put together, moving deliberately and carefully through the various systems of the body, and working up in complexity. You could look at individual bones in cross section or at particular joints, and only then move on to see a whole skeleton put together. From there, you might go see a skeleton with deep muscles attached, and so on and so forth. I left with a far better understanding of human anatomy--and a far greater appreciation of it, too. It's truly amazing how round the ball in the shoulder joint is; how complicated our neural networks are; how fractal-like our blood vessels are.

The best part of the wholly-excellent exhibition, in my opinion, was the section on the circulatory system. Via a remarkable process whereby a cadaver's blood vessels are injected with some strong substance while the rest of the body is dissolved away, one ends up with displays of full-body blood vessels without any body to get in the way. It is TRULY awesome. The lungs are permeated by millions of tiny little blood vessels, as are the kidneys; the ankle has very, very few blood vessels flowing through it indeed; the artery on the inner thigh is absolutely huge. It's fascinating. Having seen how the bones and muscles fit together, this emphatically showed what was flowing through them in a way that you simply can't show by normal drawings or even dissections.

A few thoughts:

1. The brain is such a mystery! The Bodies exhibition devoted a whole room to the brain, and I couldn't help but think: yeah, the midbrain? I can see how that works. But the cerebellum? Nope. Here we have eight or ten different brains, whole, in vivisection, with chunks removed, etc--and they all look exactly the same. There are no moving parts, no (macroscopic) tubes carrying information or fluids or both. You can see how a muscle works, how the heart works, how neural impulses move through the body, how joints turn, even how the pituitary gland and medulla oblongata manage to do things. But the cerebellum, where we do our higher-order thinking and processing of an awful lot of sensory data, is just a mystery. It's just wrinkly grey stuff. Awesome.

2. It's strange but true that internal defects or illnesses are viscerally gross-looking. There seems to be no obvious reason for this. Why should a cancerous prostate, a clogged artery, smoke-weakened lungs, a stroke-stricken brain, or a cirrhotic liver look gross? Two hypotheses present themselves. First, maybe the world in which I've grown up has been sufficiently affected by knowledge of what sick body parts look like that our concept of the grotesque has been changed to reflect the idea that these things are gross. In other words, we have learned to think of certain shapes, textures, and colors as yucky because we have seen that they reflect sickness in the human body. Alternatively, to paraphrase a suggestion from Zq, maybe we can attribute this reaction to an inherent appreciation of symmetry and pattern. Cancers, nodules, lopsided shrunkenness or engorgement, and uneven coloration all offend against a human desire for predictability and pattern in the world. (I point out here that I think the first explanation here is more plausible, while the second rings truer when I think about the experience of seeing, in the final room of the exhibition, the malformed and diseased body parts. I certainly felt like my reaction and that of those around me was visceral in a pre-existing and reasonably unconditioned way.)

3. If you want to argue that there's a God, there's no better way then to go to an exhibition like this. People are so complex, and the way all our parts fit together is absolutely amazing. It is as nearly inconceivable that we could have evolved to be so fabulously complicated as it is that the gods might have created us so.

posted by Skay @ 11:33 PM