I Experienced the World-O-Bodies!

I had the amazing opportunity to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the natural history museum last night!  I've been really really stoked to see it for a while now, and since last night was Corporate Night, I was able to get discounted tickets!  Ginger couldn't go because she had a headache and we're in the middle of moving, but I went anyway and ended up spending over two hours in there, hehe.. they sorta had to kick me out at the end. 0:-)

The exhibit was just blew me away.  They started us out slowly, with some boxes with different bones in them.  It was great to see that it was completely an educational experience; there were little facts and tidbits posted about every part and body all throughout.  The bodies were just magical to see, but the thing I got the biggest kick out of was the people around me's reactions to them!

Right from the first couple of display cases I started hearing people pointing to things and saying "See that? That's where I had broken when..." and "Oh wow, that must be the artificial hip that your grandma just got..." It was great to see. From the start, people were relating their own experiences to the displays!  More fully understanding their friend's and their own surgeries...a beautiful thing.

After a couple of cases there was the first full-body display, and man was it freaky.  It had an assembled person standing, all made out of muscle, then there was a skeleton next to it, and they were holding a baby skeleton's hands.  It was freaky enough to look at, but when I read the description next to it, the muscles were from the same body as the bones!  So this dude's muscles were standing next to his own skeleton!  Freaky!!  The kid was there to show how the bones change from being a child to adult.

The next cool thing I noticed was people starting to use their full senses.  I noticed a girl that was looking at one of the full-bodies turn to her mom and say "i wanna smell it!"  THen she leaned over, and sniff...sniff...She said it didnt' really have a smell.  I hung around each body for a while, just soaking it all in, and there were actually a few people that stopped, looked around, and smelled'em.  And I gotta agree..yep, they didn't really have a smell.

I had known that the human body was an amazing organism, but I hadn't ever grokked it so fully as I did last night.  The way the organs function, the muscles wrap, and the tendons act as pullys...amazing.  I really got a feel for the whole thing through their breath taking displays.  I even think I located some of the muscles in my shoulder area that might be causing a lot of my shoulder issues!  There's this funky one that starts at the elbow, then wraps around up through the bones around there, and connects to the front of the shoulder-joint. I need to learn the names for all this stuff, haha. But yeah, I really tried to trace it in my own body, while looking at that one.  Turns out, as I went around the exhibit I noticed a lot of people just sorta standing next to the body, flexing different muscles trying to locate the ones they were seeing.  Amazing.

There was this display that showed the entire digestive tract, from esophagus to rectum, with everything else removed.  It made me think of this thing Alan Watts always says, about how we're basically all just tubes.  We're all just tubes that require things to go in one end of them, and out the other.  Over the years, we've developed odd little feet and legs and things to move us closer to things to put through our tube, developed brains and such to more efficiently and creatively find things to put through the tube.  And all this putting of things through tubes wears them out after a while, so there's an ingenious way that's evolved to create new tubes to continue all this serious business of putting stuff through them.  It's an interesting bit of mind-candy to roll around, really, but when I was standing there, looking at; at what?  At this really really long tube!  Is that us?  My thoughts were interrupted though, by a girl that when seeing the tiny size of the esophagus said "Whoa...so That's why I choked when I swalled that piece of ice!"  I had to laugh and move on... The lessons people were learning from all this!

One of the things I took away from seeing the insides of all these bodies, is how it's really just one big mush of gunk.  I caught one of the signs talking about how tightly everything's "packed in there" and I had to pause.  "Packed in"?  Interesting western thought process, there; from the perspective of if we were to sit down and Make a body.  Well yes, we'd definitely have to "pack" everything in, but bodies aren't built, they're grown.  I really felt like I could see how everything was grown together, one giant mass of body with just different parts of it adapted to perform the actions appropriate for where they were.  Yes, it would be amazing to pack that much stuff into something so perfectly, but I think it's even more amazing to grow something that does it all by itself.

So, I learned a lot from those couple of hours at the exhibit.  The cool thing is that Ginger still wants to go, so I get to see it all again!  I learned something that i'd wondered about for a bit: How do the muscles of the heart work, to beat the whole thing at once, rather than just pushing sides of it?  Turns out the muscles around the heart form in a spiral pattern, so when they contract, the whole heart pumps.  Awesome.  I saw how the tongue connects through all the different tissues downward into the hip, the support-structure bones develop from impact and vibration, learned about the appendix which was cool becuase i visited a friend's little boy today who is in the hospital from his rupturing. 

 I also know that I don't want to get any sort of hip replacement, or vertabrae-fusing, or metal rods or metal in my wrists... They had a body that had all of those contraptions installed (haha), and it was really interesting watching the older people go up to it and examine the areas where they had had the same surgeries.  I can't think of anything more important to learn about; I was just blown away.  From all of the "wow!"s I heard being gasped around me, a lot of other people were, too.

I tried to make sure to express gratitude to the bodies as I went around the exhibit.  Their bodies may not have been donated to immediately save a life or to be studied for science, but I think they've served an even more important role: teaching so many people about themselves.  I took a moment to thank them all as I signed the guest book and left.  There was so much more to the exhibit that I won't even go on about, but just know that if you have a chance to see this, you may really dig it!!

It's funny, when the offer first came up at work, I had a hard time explaining to my co-workers why I was so excited to see it. They turned the whole thing into an odd philosophical "is it right to display people's bodies" type of deal, which is cool, but these bodies are all volunteers, so... As to the question of "is it right" in general?  They all seemed to think that it was just basically morbid, and that anybody that wanted to see it only had a morbid curiosity of seeing dead things, but that is so not right.  I think it's very important just for people to See and Understand their own bodies.  We all have one, this is what we "are" on the inside.  More of us is on the inside than the out, and it's an amazing opportunity to see the entire human body.  I was extremely glad to see that others were reacting to it that way, no matter what sort'a feelings they had about seeing it before they walked in.  I really feel it's an important thing for everyone to see, and I love the idea that now that we have this technology, it's only a matter of time before every museum has their own display for everyone to learn more about themselves through.