I was able to visit an exhibit in New York entitled "Bodies...the Exhibition". This is the promotional poster of the event and that's how the preserved body specimens look like - they are preserved organs, tissue and parts of the body of real people.
Other than being educational, the exhibit is also an eye-opener - you'll see how unhealthy organs look like, for example how lungs look like when one has cancer, how a brain of someone looks like after he has suffered a stroke. BTW, you cannot touch the specimens but at the end of the exhibit, there are some preserved organs that you're allowed to touch - a liver, brain and some bone with tissue.
Sharing with you some fascinating facts I learned from the exhibit (most likely, these were taken up in Biology class but maybe, I wasn't just paying attention! haha...):
- Bones are 5x stronger than steel.
- The brain is 80% water.
- A female's brain is 2.5% of her weight; a male's brain is 2% of his weight.
- Nerve cells create electrical impulses that reach speed exceeding 270 miles/hour.
- Studies show that eating breakfast can improve memory.
- The size of eyes do not change between infancy and adulthood.
- There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
- On average, a pack of cigarettes takes 3 hours and 40 minutes of your life (there was trash bin in this section and guess what? A lot of visitors dropped their box of cigarettes after reading this fact. Haha...)
Before going out of the exhibition, I browsed through the guest books in the kids' play area. I was curious to find out what children thought about the exhibition. Generally, the kids found the exhibit cool particularly the fetal development section. But there was one note that made me laugh! It said something like - "These things made me sick. I do not want to go to lunch anymore! Why did they cut a body open? That is ugly but kind of cool. I like it. It is weird. I will come back." Haha...
