Looking and Photographing

Science has made spectacular advances in recent decades, enabling us to study the brain from all possible angles - morphological, molecular, physiological and genetic - though we have only just begun to unravel some of the mysteries that organ encloses. One such enigma is how the forest of neurons that is our brain is organised, and this forest is what provided the inspiration for the exhibition Neuron Landscapes. These surprising images remind us at times of works by such artists as Renoir, Mir? or Picasso. The works shown were selected from amongst 433 images submitted by 62 neuroscience laboratories all over the world. Scientific advances today offer new techniques for visualising the brain's incredibly complex neuron micro-landscapes. Some techniques involve marking the neurons and their prolongations in different colours so as to distinguish them with the microscope. This reveals a stunning, multi-coloured neuron world, the "butterflies of the soul", as Cajal called the pyramidal cells in the brain cortex, "whose wing beats might, who knows, someday reveal the secret of mental life!" these images provide real encouragement for both scientific understanding and artistic intuition.

Gallery

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