Holding a brain in my hand is definitely not a frequent occurrence in my life and it got me thinking. To most people (excluding neuroscientists) a brain is not particularly exciting or interesting looking. It's a blob of slightly squishy, greyish brown matter. So I guess that even though it is located in our head, where we experience the major senses such as vision, hearing, smell, and taste, it's not too difficult to understand why people such as Aristotle thought that the heart was the center of man's behavior and emotions. After all, a brain doesn't look like it does anything, while a heart has valves and chambers and a pumping action which can accelerate when we're scared or excited and slow down when we're relaxed and sleeping.
But Aristotle, brilliant as he was, was wrong. The brain is the center of our being - where our dreams and emotions originate, memories remain and motor and sensory abilties lie (as well as any other info we've picked up along the way that we probably won't ever use again, such as the mathematical formula for finding the volume of a sphere or the name of that kid who used to chase you around on the playground in second grade).
So there I was with my little sheep brain, realizing that I held in my hand the organ that made my sheep eat, breathe, reproduce, run from danger (guess that function wasn't working too well...) and that contained sheep thoughts (should they have any) such as "the grass under the tree is better to eat than the grass by the fence."
All this by the acton of firing neurons releasing neurotransmitters. Its pretty crazy to think that everything we do from scatching our neck when it itches, to riding a bike or driving a car, to acing a test, to thinking the idea of and inventing something such as the television, to crying when we're sad and smiling when we're happy is all the result of electrical impulses and chemicals in our brains. Pretty amazing if you ask me.