Someone else’s brain, that is.
A brain that Mel held in her hands on a high school field trip to a cadaver lab, where her human biology classmates passed around a chemical-soaked, football-sized brain that had probably been dead for a decade. It felt impossible that the thing she held in her hands had once contained an entire universe: a person’s days, dreams, and drives. If only she could see inside it, and explore the magic beyond the now inanimate object that was merely a physical remainder (and reminder) of the entire human experience.
Five years later, she’d done just that as she graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience. If it was up to her, she’d like to change the jargon-y, complicated major title to something a bit simpler, but she’d decided early on that her formal education would focus on science instead of her other love, writing. There was just too much to learn! But she continued her own writing work in travel blogs and passionate essays, often invoking her neuroscience training to explain the complexities behind human perspectives, while keeping the sense of wonder that makes us human in the first place.
