If you were to die later today and your brain was removed from your skull, it would weigh about 1,400 grams - roughly the same as a bag and a half of granulated sugar. Before being preserved for posterity by being marinated in a jar of formalin, about 75 to 80 per cent of your brain would be made up of water (or COKE in your case, Des!), with just over 10 per cent fat and about 8 per cent protein. If, once it was fixed, people came to examine it and poke it about a bit, it would appear rather crinkled and whitish, and have the slightly rubbery consistency of a large mushroom.
What's more, if I were to die at the same time and have my brain treated in the same peremptory fashion, it would be so similar to yours that any difference would almost certainly be undetectable (except for the COKE in yours, Des!) The chances are that no matter how closely our respective brains were viewed, there would be hardly anything obvious to show that what amused passers-by were gazing at were two totally different specimens of the most complicated structure on this planet.
There would be nothing to reveal that of these two rubbery objects, which to some bystanders would seem faintly disgusting, one had absorbed Sam Neill's six fascinating episodes of "The Pacific - In the Wake of Captain Cook", and the other hadn't.
So you have nothing to lose by watching the first four episodes here. I shall add the remaining two as soon as they become available on iview. After all, we want to keep our two brains looking the same, don't we?
