Olin students visit the Harvard Brain Bank
Olin College students visited the Harvard Brain Bank at McLean Hospital in October as part of the Identity from the Mind and the Brain AHS Foundation course. In the course, students examine psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific approaches to understanding identity. The opportunity to handle actual human brains makes some of the theoretical concepts from the course immediately tangible as students grapple with whether the three pounds of mush in their hands constituted a person’s identity or not. For many students the experience is not only intellectual, but profoundly personal.