Scientists Intrigued by Man Whose Brain Turned Into Glass

Don't worry, he probably didn't feel it.

The cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD has fascinated researchers and historians for centuries. Since the early 1700s, engineers have been excavating the remnants of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, flash frozen in mounds of volcanic ash.

And of all the narratives pulled from the rubble, one about a 20 year old man whose brain seemingly melted into glass might be the most mystifying.

A hunk of glass in the Herculaneum man's preserved skull was first uncovered in 2020, coming off the back of research that estimated temperatures in the two doomed cities exceeded 900 degrees Fahrenheit at some points during the cataclysm.

Researchers were puzzled, because at that temperature brain matter ought to melt into goo, not solidify into glass. Of the roughly 2,000 bodies exhumed from the Vesuvian ruins, only this one's brain had been preserved this way.

Courtesy of a paper published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, we can even see what this glassified brain looks like.

This made the question of how this unfortunate soul's head came to hold a hunk of glass something of a flashpoint for archaeologists and scientists studying the volcanic event. A number of hypotheses have come forward, like one that posited the man's brain was slowly braised like osso buco.

Now, a fresh analysis by a team of researchers at Roma Tre University has found "compelling evidence that these are human brain remains, composed of organic glass formed at high temperatures, a process of preservation never previously documented for human or animal tissue, neither brain or any other kind."

The study is shedding new light on the process which preserved the man's brain for thousands of years, which Ars Technica notes is highly unusual.

Researchers posit that the man was indeed flash-fried by a rush of superhot ash as he laid in his bed, which heated his brain to the temperature required to produce molten glass, fragmenting it into chunks. Though most of the brain fragments were badly damaged, some survived total devastation thanks to the unique position of the man's skull and spine at the time of his death — which also explains why he was the only Herculaneumian to win the glass lottery.

As the air returned to an ambient temperature, it cooled rapidly by hundreds of degrees, which is when one of the young man's remaining brain chunks became a solid mass.

From there, what remained of his body was buried by layers of molten ash, rock, and gas that flowed across Herculaneum at lower temps than in Pompei, preserving the poor guy's glass brain for researchers to ogle thousands of years in the future.

It's a fascinating find with huge implications for a variety of fields, from forensic biology to volcanology to Roman history — and, let's face it, a ghoulish curiosity even by the standards of the horrors of Mt. Vesuvius.

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