Creative Skull Crafted From Real Human Brains

This seems like a no brainer, doesn’t it? What better material could an artist use to make a skull than human brains? In this particular case, skull artist Noah Scalin used pickled and preserved brain slices to be exact.

Before you immediately think this is morbid (which I also did at first), after reading about it more, you’ll see it really isn’t. It’s kind of beautiful. Noah is famous for making skulls. He’s made them out of just about everything you can think of including paper, plastic, vegetables and even pancakes.

Since the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia has a goal to “provide a place for both medical professionals and the general public to learn about medicine as both a science and an art,” it really made a lot of sense to ask Noah to create this skull for people to enjoy. Noah carefully chose 375 brain slices out of 600 total available and spent the next two days creating the skull you see below. Since the brain slices teach students about different brain diseases, the giant sculpture had to be disassembled to return the brains to their original purpose. What a fun project from beginning to end! You can read more details about Noah and this skull at 1800Recycling.