Brain Coral

Greetings everyone! I just came back from a wonderful vacation in the Turks & Caicos Islands. It was a lot of fun. There were beautiful seashells and coral along the beach. I found brain coral. It is called brain coral because it looks like a human brain. I found a large nicely formed piece and a smaller piece of brain coral. I realized that the pieces of coral could be used as a scale model to show the difference between a normal brain and an atrophied (wasted, shrunken) brain of someone with Alzheimer's disease. I will use my scale models to teach other children about Alzheimer's disease. It helps if kids can see the scale models and hold them. As you can see, the left "brain" is larger, and fuller with very small "ventricles" (the hollow space between each part of the brain). The scale model on the right shows a shrunken brain with large "ventricles" (empty space) between each part of the brain.