Knowing neurons

A dynamic installation highlighting the fluidity of brain function

“The work is a homage to the beauty and sheer complexity of the structure and its steady development, its genetically-driven growth influenced by experience.”

“The complexity and beauty of its structure... reflects the developmental constraints that shaped its growth.”

These two quotes are from writers extolling the wonder of the neuron, as disclosed by modern neurobiology. The first is from Andrew Carnie, one of the 'researching artists' featured in the exhibition “Head On. Art with the Brain in Mind” at the Science Museum in London (on view until 28 July 2002). The second is from Richard Wingate of the Medical Research Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, King's College London, in whose laboratory Carnie was introduced first-hand to “the distributed circuitry whose logic remains one of the greatest mysteries of biology” (Wingate again).

Their shared experience was the result of one of eight such collaborations set up by the curators of the exhibition — Caterina Albano, Ken Arnold and Marina Wallace — under the aegis of the Wellcome Trust. The other artists are Osi Audu, Annie Cattrel, Catherine Dowson, Letizia Galli, Claude Heath, Gerhard Lang and Tim O'Riley.

In building up his three-dimensional visualization of the brain, Carnie looked back to the pioneering work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal. Cajal used thin slices of tissue, impregnated with resin and stained by a method invented by Camillo Golgi, to construct an imaginative spatial picture of the cellular structure within the brain. Using Golgi stains, Cajal was able to infer the composition of different brain regions and even to suggest the direction of information flow. Cajal and Golgi were awarded Nobel prizes in 1906.

The modern resources available to Carnie, such as laser-scanning confocal microscopes and MRI scans, can be used to create compelling spatial arrays and to transcend the static pictures of morbid anatomy, capturing the three-dimensional dynamism of the living circuitry. Carnie was drawn into the amazing worlds of the proliferation, migration and connectivity of neurons in the developing mind, particularly as drifting memories are laid down.

What Carnie set out to capture in his installation, Magic Forest (above), was not an illustration of brain physiology but an evocation of the fluid flux that is the essence of neuronal transformation, as the growing cells extend their branches to communicate with companions near and far. Two projectors stand three metres apart on plinths at either end of a darkened space. They alternately project 160 slides on to three large gauze screens. As the images dissolve into one another, the forest grows and diminishes, comes and goes, builds and collapses, layer by layer, in an endless loop of generation and decay.

At these cutting edges of creative visualization, the tasks of the artist and the scientist both begin at the boundaries where knowledge runs thin. The artist gives vent to his awe through the magic of visual suggestion; the scientist through an insatiable urge to explain 'how'.

“It has been a breathtaking experience.” The words are Carnie's, but they could have been said by any scientist grappling with what Wingate calls the “slices, fragments and snapshots” that “remain, for the time being, the basis of our understanding of neuroanatomy”.