Giant Artwork Reflects The Gorgeous Complexity Of The Human Brain
Giant Artwork Reflects The Gorgeous Complexity of The Human Brain
The new work at The Franklin Institute may be the most complex and detailed artistic depiction of the brain ever.
Your brain has approximately 86 billion neurons joined together through some 100 trillion connections, giving rise to a complex biological machine capable of pulling off amazing feats. Yet it’s difficult to truly grasp the sophistication of this interconnected web of cells.
Now, a new work of art based on actual scientific data provides a glimpse into this complexity.
The 8-by-12-foot gold panel, depicting a sagittal slice of the human brain, blends hand drawing and multiple human brain datasets from several universities. The work was created by Greg Dunn, a neuroscientist-turned-artist, and Brian Edwards, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and goes on display at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
“The human brain is insanely complicated,” Dunn said. “Rather than being told that your brain has 80 billion neurons, you can see with your own eyes what the activity of 500,000 of them looks like, and that has a much greater capacity to make an emotional impact than does a factoid in a book someplace.”
To reflect the neural activity within the brain, Dunn and Edwards have developed a technique called micro-etching: They paint the neurons by making microscopic ridges on a reflective sheet in such a way that they catch and reflect light from certain angles. When the light source moves in relation to the gold panel, the image appears to be animated, as if waves of activity are sweeping through it.
First, the visual cortex at the back of the brain lights up, then light propagates to the rest of the brain, gleaming and dimming in various regions — just as neurons would signal inside a real brain when you look at a piece of art.
That’s the idea behind the name of Dunn and Edwards’ piece: “Self Reflected.” It’s basically an animated painting of your brain perceiving itself in an animated painting.
To make the artwork resemble a real brain as closely as possible, the artists used actual MRI scans and human brain maps, but the datasets were not detailed enough. “There were a lot of holes to fill in,” Dunn said. Several students working with the duo explored scientific literature to figure out what types of neurons are in a given brain region, what they look like and what they are connected to. Then the artists drew each neuron.
Dunn and Edwards then used data from DTI scans — a special type of imaging that maps bundles of white matter connecting different regions of the brain. This completed the picture, and the results were scanned into a computer. Using photolithography, the artists etched the image onto a panel covered with gold leaf.
“A lot of times in science and engineering, we take a complex object and distill it down to its bare essential components, and study that component really well” Edwards said. But when it comes to the brain, understanding one neuron is very different from understanding how billions of neurons work together and give rise to consciousness.
“Of course, we can’t explain consciousness through an art piece, but we can give a sense of the fact that it is more complicated than just a few neurons,” he added.
The artists hope their work will inspire people, even professional neuroscientists, “to take a moment and remember that our brains are absolutely insanely beautiful and they are buzzing with activity every instant of our lives,” Dunn said. “Everybody takes it for granted, but we have, at the very core of our being, the most complex machine in the entire universe.”
Image 1: A computer image of “Self Reflected,” an etching of a human brain created by artists Greg Dunn and Brian Edwards.
Image 2: A close-up of the cerebellum in the finished work.
Image 3: A close-up of the motor cortex in the finished work.
Image 4: This is what “Self Reflected” looks like when it’s illuminated with all white light.
Image 5: Pons and brainstem close up.
Image 6: Putkinje neurons - color encodes reflective position in microetching.
Image 7: Primary visual cortex in the calcarine fissure.
Image 8: Basal ganglia and connected circuitry.
Image 9: Parietal cortex.
Image 10: Cerebellum.
Credit for all Images: Greg Dunn - “Self Reflected”
Source: The Huffington Post (by Bahar Gholipour)
More Posts from Contradictiontonature and Others
5 sleep disorders you didn’t know existed
Ever shouted at your partner while you slept, or woken up unable to move? From apnoea to exploding heads, here are some strange things that go bump in the night.
Sleep apnoea
A surprisingly common condition in which you stop breathing for 10 seconds or more as you sleep. The lack of oxygen causes your brain to wake you up, or pull you into much lighter sleep. Either way, it can have a profound effect on the quality of your sleep – and that of any bedfellow, as it’s often accompanied by loud snoring.
Sleep paralysis
A terrifying experience, where the body, which naturally becomes paralysed duringREM sleep, is still paralysed when you wake. You are fully conscious but cannot move or speak, sometimes for several minutes. Some people also feel as if they are choking or their chest is being crushed and they may have visual hallucinations. The condition can be exacerbated by sleep deprivation, some drugs, and disorders such as sleep apnoea.
Hypnagogic jerks
Those jumps or twitches you experience as you nod off, often accompanied by the sensation of falling. The cause remains a mystery. One idea is that you start dreaming before your body becomes paralysed. Another is that the twitches are a by-product of your nervous system relaxing as you drift off.
REM sleep disorder
If you’ve ever punched or shouted at your partner in the night, only to remember nothing next morning, you may have been in the grip of this condition. Here, the body isn’t fully paralysed during REM sleep, so people act out their dreams. Thistends to happen only with bad dreams.
Exploding head syndrome
This entails the sensation of a loud noise, like an exploding bomb or a gunshot, as you drift off or wake up. It affects about 1 in 10 of us and it tends to start around age 50. Nobody knows what causes it– perhaps physical changes in the middle ear, or a minor seizure in the brain’s temporal lobe. Despite its name, the condition is harmless.
Image Credit: Toby Leigh
Source: New Scientist (By Catherine de Lange)
Breaking News:
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2018 has been awarded to Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics”.
Donna Strickland is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 55 years.
Nobel Laureate Arthur Ashkin has been awarded the #NobelPrize in Physics “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems.”
Nobel Laureates Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland have been awarded the #NobelPrize in Physics “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses.”
Article here with more information about their work:
Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland win Nobel physics prize
Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about creationism, science celebrities and kids on National Geographic. Watch the full video here.
The brilliant colors of a soap film reveal the fluid’s thickness, thanks to a process known as thin film interference. The twisting flow of the film depends on many influences: gravity pulls down on the liquid and tends to make it drain away; evaporation steals fluid from the film; local air currents can push or pull the film; and the variation in the concentration of molecules – specifically the surfactants that stabilize the film – will change the local surface tension, causing flow via the Marangoni effect. Together these and other effects create the dancing turbulence captured above. (Video credit: A. Filipowicz)
Today is the Autumn Equinox in the northern hemisphere! What’s behind the changing colours of autumn leaves? http://wp.me/p4aPLT-sn
A special organic dye, Nile Red in different solvents.
From left to right I dissolved equal amounts of Nile Red (a dye) in different solvents. The solvents were: methanol, diisopropyl ether, hexane, n-propanol, tetrahydrofuran, toluene, ethanol, acetone.
Depending on the solvents polarity, the dye dissolved to give different colored solutions (upper image), this is called solvatochromism. It is the ability of a chemical substance to change color due to a change in solvent polarity.
Under UV light, these solutions emitted different colors (bottom pics), this is called solvatofluorescence. The emission and excitation wavelength both shift depending on solvent polarity, so it fluoresces with different color depending on the solvent what it’s dissolved in.
Nile Red is a quite expensive dye, which costs a bit over 1000 USD/gram, therefore I had to make it. The purification of the raw material was posted HERE.
To help the blog, donate to Labphoto through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/labphoto
The multiverse might not be madness after all.
Alternate realities, parallel dimensions, and multiple universes. Whatever you call it, the notion of other versions of existence is one of the most popular tropes in science fiction. In some other universe, you’re not reading this sentence but skydiving. In another, you’re nothing but a cockroach. In yet another, not only is life impossible, but atoms don’t even exist.
In recent years, though, such seemingly crazy ideas have shifted from fantasy and speculation toward bona fide science. Even among physicists, the multiverse has gone mainstream.
Theoretically, infinite universes might stretch beyond our own, like endless bubbles in a sea of boiling water. Each bubble has its own laws of physics, and although we may never visit or even see another bubble, some physicists say growing evidence is making the multiverse increasingly plausible—and even probable. Learn more here.
23 science facts we didn't know at the start of 2016
1. Gravitational waves are real. More than 100 years after Einstein first predicted them, researchers finally detected the elusive ripples in space time this year. We’ve now seen three gravitational wave events in total.
2. Sloths almost die every time they poop, and it looks agonising.
3. It’s possible to live for more than a year without a heart in your body.
4. It’s also possible to live a normal life without 90 percent of your brain.
5. There are strange, metallic sounds coming from the Mariana trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface. Scientists currently think the noise is a new kind of baleen whale call.
6. A revolutionary new type of nuclear fusion machine being trialled in Germany really works, and could be the key to clean, unlimited energy.
7. There’s an Earth-like planet just 4.2 light-years away in the Alpha Centauri star system - and scientists are already planning a mission to visit it.
8. Earth has a second mini-moon orbiting it, known as a ‘quasi-satellite’. It’s called 2016 HO3.
9. There might be a ninth planet in our Solar System (no, Pluto doesn’t count).
10. The first written record demonstrating the laws of friction has been hiding inside Leonardo da Vinci’s “irrelevant scribbles” for the past 500 years.
11. Zika virus can be spread sexually, and it really does cause microcephaly in babies.
12. Crows have big ears, and they’re kinda terrifying.
13. The largest known prime number is 274,207,281– 1, which is a ridiculous 22 million digits in length. It’s 5 million digits longer than the second largest prime.
14. The North Pole is slowly moving towards London, due to the planet’s shifting water content.
15. Earth lost enough sea ice this year to cover the entire land mass of India.
16. Artificial intelligence can beat humans at Go.
17. Tardigrades are so indestructible because they have an in-built toolkit to protect their DNA from damage. These tiny creatures can survive being frozen for decades, can bounce back from total desiccation, and can even handle the harsh radiation of space.
18. There are two liquid states of water.
19. Pear-shaped atomic nuclei exist, and they make time travel seem pretty damn impossible.
20. Dinosaurs had glorious tail feathers, and they were floppy.
21. One third of the planet can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live.
22. There’s a giant, 1.5-billion-cubic-metre (54-billion-cubic-foot) field of precious helium gas in Tanzania.
23. The ‘impossible’ EM Drive is the propulsion system that just won’t quit. NASA says it really does seem to produce thrust - but they still have no idea how. We’ll save that mystery for 2017.
Feeling a little small? Well in the context of the cosmos, we are small. We may just be little guys living on a speck of dust, afloat in a staggering immensity…
…but we dont think small.
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A pharmacist and a little science sideblog. "Knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world." - Louis Pasteur
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