A new study, using MRI scans and computation modeling, has shown the living human brain to be extremely fragile and squishy. According to the research, published in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface, “the extremely low stiffness of [the] brain leads to collapse under its own weight.”

People may not realize how gelatinous and wobbly this all-important organ is. That’s because brains depicted in the media look stable, having been removed, subject to temperature change, and treated with preserving agents like formaldehyde to enhance their stiffness.

One of the study’s co-authors, Nicholas Bennion, told New Scientist, “If you take a brain which hasn’t been preserved in any way, its stiffness is incredibly low, and it breaks apart very easily. And it really is probably a lot softer than most people realize.”

Bennion and the other researchers investigated the mechanics of how the brain’s squishiness allows it to move with the skull, called “positional brain shift” as well as how resilient the brain is to pressure. They scanned the brains of 11 people as they lay face down and face up and found that our thinking caps move relatively little inside the skull.

The participant’s movements caused the deep brain to shift approximately one millimeter, while the brain’s surface moved by only half a millimeter, due to the “tethering effect” of the surrounding tissue. Further, the study calculated that the organ can tolerate 148 kilopascals of pressure.

Researchers hope their findings will help “reduce the impact of positional brain shift in stereotactic neurosurgery.”