Though they may look like they are made from rubber, human brains are softer and squishier. Their ability to resist pressure is much less than the polystyrene foam used for packaging, more comparable to that of Jell-O. Nicholas Bennion at Cardiff University in the UK and his colleagues set out to develop a method for obtaining more accurate measurements of the brain's physical properties inside living humans. Most of what we know about how brain tissue reacts to instruments touching it during neurosurgery comes from organs that have been cut into or removed and preserved in chemicals, which can affect tissue stiffness and resilience. The researchers performed MRI scans of people lying face down and then face up to shift the location of the brain in the skull.

Though they may look like they're made from rubber, human brains are softer and squishier. Their ability to resist pressure is like that of a slab of gelatine, and they break apart more easily than polystyrene foam used for packaging. Nicholas Bennion at Cardiff University in the UK and his colleagues set out to develop a method for obtaining more accurate measurements of the brain's physical properties inside living humans. Most of what we know about how brain tissue reacts to instruments touching it during neurosurgery comes from organs that have been cut into or removed and preserved in chemicals, which can affect tissue stiffness and resiliency. Combining a machine learning algorithm with MRI scans of people lying face down and then face up to shift the location of the brain in the skull, the researchers were able to work out different material characteristics of the brain and tissues that connect it to the skull.