Commissioned by the Society for Neuroscience, Washington DC. This painting by Greg Dunn, “Beyond the Horizon.” is of the developing cerebral cortex, at about week 15 of human gestation.
Greg Dunn is a neuroscience PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania and an artist passionate about Japanese minimalist scrolls. While these interests may appear radically incongruous, Dunn’s artwork suggests otherwise. The artist creates dazzling works of enamel, gold leaf and ink inspired by science.
Some of the works, like “Hippocampus II,” give those of us who do not spend a lot of time around a microscope a look at the complex architecture of our neurons. And then there are the occasional stumpers that are impossible to decipher as neuron or nature.
Learn more about Greg’s inspiration and influencers in this interview in The Beautiful Brain
Science writer Rita Carter tells the story of how modern neuroscience has revealed that reading, something most of us take for granted, unlocks remarkable powers. Carter explains how the classic novel Wuthering Heights allows us to step inside other minds and understand the world from different points of view, and she wonders whether the new digital revolution could threaten the values of classic reading.
An interesting article in the New York Times. Todd Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in a remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.
It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects. link to read more about this journey
Next time your brain plays tricks on you, you have an excuse: according to new research by UCL scientists published today in the journal Nature, the brain is intrinsically unreliable.
This may not seem surprising to most of us, but it has puzzled neuroscientists for decades. Given that the brain is the most powerful computing device known, how can it perform so well even though the behaviour of its circuits is variable?
A long-standing hypothesis is that the brain’s circuitry actually is reliable – and the apparently high variability is because your brain is engaged in many tasks simultaneously, which affect each other. [continue reading…]
