The NYT just ran an article about an intriguing art book that melds neuroscience and art together in a new and unusual way. Carl Shoonover, who is a 27-year-old doctoral candidate in neurology, has just published, “Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century.” The book is the author’s attempt to display the colors and images of the mind in a beautiful way and includes both images and essays from hundreds of years ago to the present.  

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see the book, but am entranced (and slightly disturbed) by the NYT writer’s description of some of an image contained within the art/science book and the accompanying description of what the image meant.

From the NYT:

Consider, for instance, a blurry little black-and-white photograph of a smiley-face icon, so fuzzy and ill-defined it looks like a parody of the Shroud of Turin. The picture is actually a miracle in its own right: the high-speed video camera that shot it was trained on the exposed brain of a monkey staring at a yellow smiley face. As the monkey looked at the face, blood vessels supplying nerve cells in the visual part of the monkey’s brain transiently swelled in exactly the same pattern. We can tell what was on the monkey’s mind by inspecting its brain. The picture forms a link, primitive but palpable, between corporeal and evanescent, between the body and the spirit. And behind the photo stretches a long history of inspired neuro-scientific deductions and equally inspired mistakes, all aiming to illuminate just that link.

(For those who are disturbed by exposed money brains, you may want to read THIS.  I don’t know, however, when the actual image was taken, so don’t know if it was recent or not--obviously I hope this was not recently taken.)

The author, Carl Shoonover, also wrote a post for the Huffington Post in which he includes his own personal top ten list of brain images. He also writes that he likes to carry around little snapshots of his favorite brain scans, drawings, and paintings in his wallet in lieu of photographs of actual people which he then shows off to anyone who will look. The images he includes in his list vary from a retina of a chick to the axon pathways in a live human brain--the image showing the pathways is of a brain that has recently suffered a stroke-- I find it really interesting that neurologists like Carl Shoonover have the ability to actually view the links and pathways within a brain.

 In The Atlantic Monthly’s article on the book, Carl Shoonover and writer Michelle Legro offer a little information on the study of the brain and the methods used to do so:

Our modern perspective relies entirely on technologies developed, or adapted, to scrutinize it -- chemical stains, state-of-the-art genetics, x-rays, MRIs, protein tagging. The resulting data reveal subtle variations in shape, intensity, and color, enabling scientists to pinpoint exactly what they seek to unveil and ignore the surrounding clutter.

For a brief interview with Carl Shoonover about the book, follow this LINK. The video—which unfortunately can’t be embedded—appears on the right left side of the page.