Increasing evidence suggests that the mechanical environment of the brain plays an important role in neuronal development and disease. Reported stiffness values vary significantly, but the origin of these variations remains unknown. Here we show that stiffness of our brain is correlated to the underlying tissue microstructure and directly proportional to the local myelin content. Myelin has been discovered in 1854 as an insulating layer around nerve cells to improve electric signal propagation. Our study now shows that it also plays an important mechanical role: Using a combined mechanical characterization and histological characterization, we found that the white matter stiffness increases linearly with increasing myelin content, from 0.5kPa at a myelin content of 63-2.5kPa at 92%.

Many neurodegenerative diseases are related to the propagation and accumulation of toxic proteins throughout the brain. The lesions created by aggregates of these toxic proteins further lead to cell death and accelerated tissue atrophy. A striking feature of some of these diseases is their characteristic pattern and evolution, leading to well-codified disease stages visible to neuropathology and associated with various cognitive deficits and pathologies. Here, we simulate the anisotropic propagation and accumulation of toxic proteins in full brain geometry. We show that the same model with different initial seeding zones reproduces the characteristic evolution of different prionlike diseases. We also recover the expected evolution of the total toxic protein load. Finally, we couple our transport model to a mechanical atrophy model to obtain the typical degeneration patterns found in neurodegenerative diseases.

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Alterations in brain rheology are increasingly recognized as a diagnostic marker for various neurological conditions. Magnetic resonance elastography now allows us to assess brain rheology repeatably, reproducibly, and non-invasively in vivo. Recent elastography studies suggest that brain stiffness decreases one percent per year during normal aging, and is significantly reduced in Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis. While existing studies successfully compare brain stiffnesses across different populations, they fail to provide insight into changes within the same brain. Here we characterize rheological alterations in one and the same brain under extreme metabolic changes: alive and dead. Strikingly, the storage and loss moduli of the cerebrum increased by 26% and 60% within only three minutes post mortem and continued to increase by 40% and 103% within 45 minutes. Immediate post mortem stiffening displayed pronounced regional variations; it was largest in the corpus callosum and smallest in the brainstem. We postulate that post mortem stiffening is a manifestation of alterations in polarization, oxidation, perfusion, and metabolism immediately after death. Our results suggest that the stiffness of our brain-unlike any other organ-is a dynamic property that is highly sensitive to the metabolic environment. Our findings emphasize the importance of characterizing brain tissue in vivo and question the relevance of ex vivo brain tissue testing as a whole. Knowing the true stiffness of the living brain has important consequences in diagnosing neurological conditions, planning neurosurgical procedures, and modeling the brain's response to high impact loading.