The Brain

Yesterday my husband and I took his aunt to the American Museum of Natural History.  It was awesome!  The AMNH is one of my favorite places in the entire city and I could (and have, in fact) spent days of my time just wandering through the exhibits like it is the Holy Church of Chocolate and Awesome.  While we were there we saw the IMAX movie Sea Rex which did an excellent job of introducing me to some marine reptiles I hadn't heard of previously including the liopleurodon, a short-necked plesiosaur of enormous size that looks like it has the head and body of a crocodile and the flippers of a sea turtle.  It was fascinating!  We also saw the planetarium show Journey to the Stars as narrated by Whoopi Goldberg which was lots of fun.

The best part was the brain exhibit though!  They had a full exhibit on the workings of the brain and discussed the evolution of the brain, memory, addiction, love and other emotions, and the 5 senses.

This is a display showing the different parts of the brain as they apply to your 5 senses.  The various colored sections show which parts of the brain work your sense of smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight.

This is a GIANT brain that shows memory and how the brain functions with a dancer.  You see a video of the dancer rehearsing and the brain lights up in different places as she memorized this pattern.  They talked about how similar brain patterns would be when you learned to tie your shoes or do other repetitive things.  I'll never be able to look at another 4 year old without imagining the inside of their head lighting up like the Las Vegas strip at 2 a.m.

This was a display showing the parts of your body most sensitive to touch.  The more sensitive the body part the larger it is on this statue.  Before you ask, no, they left the sexy bits normal sized.  I guess they didn't want to deal with 7,000 5 year olds saying, "Daddy, that statue has a huge wiener!" so they left that bit out of the display.

This is a giant, light up neuron that was part of a larger display about synapses and such.  There were several of these and you could watch the light travel from neuron to neuron to show how information travels through the brain. 

It was incredibly fun and informative!  If you are in the city and can make the trip I highly recommend it.  We didn't stay for the whole day unfortunately because the puppy needed to be let out of her crate so we limited ourselves to 3 hours at the museum.  It was a fabulous 3 hours though!  Then we went home and spent some time with our pets.  Here is a picture of the puppy taking a walk in her sweater for those of you who love adorable pet pictures.