Pickled in a jar or quivering under the anatomist's blade, the brain reveals very little of itself. In order to understand the organ, generations of scientists have pioneered increasingly sophisticated ways of examining it -- first by feeling its weight, shape, and color, then by cutting into it, magnifying its daunting muddle of cells, initially without much to tell them apart. And as they investigated the form and workings of the brain, neuroscientists have invented new ways of seeing. 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.
Over the decades, the undifferentiated, monochrome swath of cells under the microscope's lens has bloomed into glorious Technicolor. In the new book Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, Columbia neuroscience PhD student Carl Schoonover curates and comments on a selection of images of neuroscience data generated in laboratories all over the world -- many of which have never been seen outside of the research community. Along with a foreword by Jonah Lehrer, and essays contributed by leading scientists, the book accounts for the tremendous sense of hope and anticipation that is shared by many in the field today, as an avalanche of innovative technologies arrives onto the scene. The set of images in this slideshow represents more than one hundred years of techniques that have been employed by scientists to expand our understanding of the way the brain is built and how it functions.
Introduction by Michelle Legro; Slide captions by Carl Schoonover.
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