Week 7 - Neuroscience + Art

 Week 7 - Neuroscience + Art

Drawing of Purkinje cells (A) and granule cells (B) from 
pigeon cerebellum by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1899. 

Neuroscience and art are intertwined in many ways, as is true in general for science and art. With the brain being such a complex organ that is yet to be fully understood, both neuroscience and art provide unique insights into concepts related to memory, mental illnesses, consciousness, neural networks and more.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, is often remembered for his fantastic drawings of neural structures and their connectivity. Today, his depictions are still used for educational and training purposes. As mentioned before in week 4’s blog, medicine and art have long been connected through their concerted efforts to anatomize and document the human body. Cajal is no exception to this and his illustrations revolutionized the field of neuroscience, pioneering modern science on neurons and neural networks.

Art is prevalent in neuroscience even more so when considering how scientists can visualize microscopic cells. For example, Brainbow is a process in which individual neurons in a brain sample can be easily distinguished from neighboring neurons by using fluorescent proteins. Although the process was developed by professors of Molecular & Cellular biology at Harvard University, there is no doubt that the brainbows are works of art.

Brainbow of genetically modified mouse's hippocampus.
By Tamily Weissman, Harvard University. 

The Resolution Effect by Amanpreet Badhwar
and Pierre Bellec, 2016. 

Today, visual artists and neuroscientists are working together on developing new, creative techniques for mapping and visualizing the brain. The Neuro Bureau is a forum and collaborative initiative that hosts conferences, events and competitions centered around bringing attention to the more aesthetically-orientated aspects of neuroscience. At one of their exhibitions Reaching Beyond The Obvious, scientists such as Amanpreet Badhwar and Pierre Bellec develop artwork showing the aesthetic brilliance of the brain. One of their pieces, The Resolution Effect, shown at the exhibition in Montreal represents, “the binarized average functional connectivity matrices generated using functional brain parcellations of differing sizes (the smaller the parcels,the higher the resolution). The size of each node is a function of its degree of connectedness. It alludes to the fact that the dense web of connections visualized result from the use of high-resolution functional parcellations” (Amanpreet Cadhwar & Jakobsen).

Sources:

-         Badhwar, Amanpreet. Amanpreet Badhwar. http://www.amanbadhwar.com/.

-          Badhwar, Amanpreet, and Estrid Jakobsen. “The Interplay between Neuroscience and Art.” Organization for Human Brain Mapping, 3 June 2017, http://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/1/post/2017/06/the-interplay-between-neuroscience-and-art.html.

-          Frazzetto, Giovanni, and Suzanne Anker. “Neuroculture.” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 11, Nov. 2009, pp. 815–21. PubMed, doi:10.1038/nrn2736.

-          Gangarossa, Giuseppe. “When Arts Meet Neuroscience...” PLOS Neuroscience Community, 16 Oct. 2016, https://blogs.plos.org/neuro/2016/10/16/when-arts-meet-neuroscience-by-naureen-ghani/.

-          Landau, Elizabeth. “What the Brain Draws from: Art and Neuroscience.” CNN, 15 Sept. 2012, https://www.cnn.com/2012/09/15/health/art-brain-mind/index.html.

-          “The Neuro Bureau.” The Neuro Bureau, https://www.neurobureau.org/.

Images:

-          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal#/media/File:PurkinjeCell.jpg

-          https://www.cell.com/pictureshow/brainbow

https://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/blog/the-interplay-between-neuroscience-and-art