The Beautiful Mind

December 2, 2010 11:07 AM

"It is only fitting that the story of the brain should be a visual one, for the visuals had the ancients fooled for millenniums. The brain was so ugly that they assumed the mind must lie elsewhere. Now those same skeletal silhouettes glow plump and brightly colored, courtesy of a variety of inserted genes encoding fluorescent molecules. A glossy new art book, “Portraits of the Mind,” hopes to draw the general reader into neuroscience with the sheer beauty of its images." Slide Shows: The Beautiful Mind and Portraits of the Mind

Book reviews:

The Atlantic: "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."

Brain Pickings: "Author Carl Schoonover explores — in breathtaking visual detail — the evolution of humanity’s understanding of the brain, from Medieval sketches to Victorian medical engravings to today’s most elaborate 3D brain mapping."

posted by zarq (6 comments total)

I imagine this would be a nice book to take along to visit AMNH's new "Brain" exhibit.
posted by monospace at 11:20 AM on December 2, 2010

[T]hey assumed the mind must lie elsewhere.

Many still do, I assure you.
posted by LordSludge at 11:24 AM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

for the visuals had the ancients fooled for millenniums

So much is wrong with this sentence.
posted by Sparx at 12:00 PM on December 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Mind boggling pictures though. Lovely. And oddly resistent to my primitive efforts to steal them for the sheer joy of it all.
posted by fcummins at 1:06 PM on December 2, 2010

The same story but from a survival-of-the-fittest vantage point: John Allman's exquisite textbook Evolving Brains.
posted by dongolier at 2:17 PM on December 2, 2010

I would really like to buy copies of some of those as art but I've never found anywhere that has them for sale that way.
posted by Maias at 2:52 PM on December 2, 2010