Worlds of Bodies

Yesterday I bid the Body Worlds exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum adieu by visiting the museum. I did not really want to go, but my mother had wanted to since the exhibit came to San Diego and I thought she should see it since it was its last day.

I came to a series of conclusions:

1. Beauty is only skin deep for me. Once you remove the skin of a person, I no longer find her attractive or beautiful.

2. It is extremely difficult to tell the difference between preserved dead bodies and plastic reproductions.

3. "Amygdala" would be a perfect name for a fictional character, especially an emotional one.

4. Science neglects (or so far hasn't empirically discovered) the soul. Thus, things like love are attributed to a special part of the brain (the amygdala), and therefore could be categorized and generalized. Creativity is also presumed to be caused by the brain (and not by muses... oh, those silly ancients!).

5. People can die in the middle of hitting a home run, scoring a goal in soccer, or doing yoga.

6. You have very little control over your body, much less control than you think.

7. Eyeballs without eyelids are frightening.

8. The human body, cut apart and suspended by strings, is monstrous.

What I couldn't quite decipher is the relationship of the soul to the body--but of course that would not be the place to do it. Still, I couldn't quite help but think that if the soul is somehow connected to the body, then were those people watching us as we watched them? Were we somehow torturing these deceased people, even though during life they willingly donated their bodies to science? It disturbed me a little, as if I were exhuming a grave.

I also found myself thinking along the lines of pre-Renaissance thinkers: the body is a sac in which is held bile and waste.

Nonetheless, it was hideously fascinating, and I learned quite a bit. But, like Doctor Faustus, I was left to wonder at what cost did I recieve this knowledge. Overall, the exhibit made me revisit questions (and definitions) of life and death and that element that makes us human and not merely a series of electrical impulses and chemical reactions responding to stimuli. I did not come up with any concrete answers for the important questions, however. At least my mother enjoyed the experience.