Art in Science: How Innovative Images Led to a 'Miraculous' Revolution in Neurology

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 6, 2012 at 5:42am

Carl Schoonover, author of Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century , describes the "miraculous" revolution that occurred in neural imaging during the late 19th century. Because of the work of two men, he explains, our image of the brain went from "the gross outer contour" to "a representation of objects residing inside of brain matter."

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To open the exhibition, Neural Architectures, we celebrate the beauty of brain imagery with presentations from curator Benjamin Bollmann and Carl E. Schoonover, author of The New York Times bestseller, Portraits of the Mind.

Portraits collects images of the brain from medieval sketches to scans captured in today's labs for an amazing tour of the mind, with descriptions of each technique from leading neuroscientists. Book signing during the reception in collaboration with Book Passage.

Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams, November 2010) follows the fascinating exploration of the brain through images. These beautiful black-and-white and vibrantly colored images, many resembling abstract art, are employed daily by scientists around the world, but most have never before been seen by the general public. From medieval sketches and 19th-century drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience to images produced using state-of-the-art techniques, readers are invited to witness the fantastic networks in the brain.

Each chapter in Portraits of the Mind addresses a different set of techniques for studying the brain, and each is introduced with an essay by a leading scientist in that field. Extended captions provide detailed explanations of each image as well as the major insights gained by scientists over the course of the past twenty years. The result is a peek at the mind's innermost workings, helping readers to understand, and offering clues about what may lie ahead.