The winner for the Wellcome Image Image Awards 2012, is a picture of a real nude living brain. It is beautiful and grotesque and makes me wonder/understand the fascination we have with gore in media. This image is different then gore for me because it is separate from violence, while most “inside of you” media is about violence. What’s the word for gore without violence? Anyway, beautiful. And I would suggest reading the “Why”… well here it is quoted from the Wellcome Image site…

Alice Roberts (anatomist, author and TV presenter) explains: “This is a stunning image. Taken during an operation, which allows surgeons access to inside the skull, for recording electrical impulses, we are looking at the surface of a living brain. It’s just extraordinary: the ‘grey’ matter (which is grey in death) is blushing pink. Small arteries are glowing with the scarlet blood pulsing through them, while purple veins lie thickly in the sulci, the crevices of the brain. And underneath that is somebody’s mind. For me, the context, the composition and the clarity of this image made it a winner.”

A lot of those words are supposed to be gross, right? I just really like this exultation of the beauty of life as opposed to images of … I don’t know, Dexter is the first thing that comes to mind. The most I see of brains on TV or popular media is when they are being blown against a wall. So, thanks Wellcome Images for saluting innard beauty!