In 1848, railroad worker Phineas Gage had a 3.5-foot, 13 pound tamping iron blown through the front of his skull in a construction accident. Hell of a way to start your Wednesday (yes, I checked). He survived.
The story of Phineas Gage is now the stuff of legend, taught to first-year neuroscience students around the world. How did this man survive a rod through the frontal lobe? Doctors that wrote of him later spoke of extreme behavioral changes, a man who was “. . . fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows”.
Unfortunately, the legend of Phineas Gage’s post-injury brain is largely exaggerated, or at least based on rather thin evidence. But still, he was still a changed man, even if not in the extreme ways his legend suggests.
UCLA’s Jack Van Horn has reconstructed a model of Phineas Gage’s connectome. In the image above, the lower left image shows the “connectogram” of 110 healthy right-handed males, the major highways and byways between brain regions (the brain stem is at 6 o’clock, left and right hemispheres at 9 and 3 o’clock). The lower right image shows the connections that were likely disrupted by the iron spike through Gage’s frontal lobe.
Mo Costandi has a great write-up that you should check out. We now have a map of the damage to Gage’s brain. But do we really know any more about his supposed behavioral changes? Thanks to the exaggerations and sideshow mentality of those who studied hm while alive, likely not.
BONUS: Be sure to check out Robert Krulwich and Carl Zimmer moderating this debate on how much stock we should put in the connectome.
(via Neurophilosophy blog)
River of Dreams
The hippocampus is a region of the mammalian brain involved in learning and memory. In this confocal microscopy image of an adult mouse’s hippocampus by Sandra Dieni of the Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Albert-Ludwigs University in Germany, reactive astroglia (star-shaped cells that support neurons in the brain, here colored pale yellow) have proliferated and enlarged in response to neuronal activity over time.
(Source: ucsdhealthsciences, via freshphotons)
Greg Dunn: Neurons Painted As Japanese Scrolls
Greg Dunn paints neurons. He uses brushless methods that allow the ink to roll spontaneously across the paper, recreating the ordered randomness of neural projections. He also uses smooth brush strokes that he says “…capture the natural molecular unfolding of nature.”
Here’s what he has to say about what artists can learn from science (and maybe vice versa):
Fundamentally art and science are ruled by the same principal. You must start any project with a clear idea of what your question is. You start with a clear idea and you follow it up with a clear hypothesis. You are trying to get to the root of this question. And when you start painting you are trying to get to the resolution of this question. If you don’t have a clear foundation you will never produce something that is great.
(via Huffington Post)
Albert Einstein, one of artist Noma Bar’s brilliant minimalist portraits of cultural icons
Relativity amazing.
