Kingdom of the Blind

Growing a brain

2012-02-13T14:16:00.000+11:00

It was exciting to read this story in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning, about scientists who can convince cast-off skin cells to turn into brain cells. I'm not exactly clear on whether they have grown actual human neurons in the lab from this process, or just the progenitor cells that might turn into neurons later, but the overall positive message seems to be that it may, in future, be possible to transplant stem cells from the patients own tissue into failing brains and thus counteract the degenerative processes of Alzheimer's and age. The full paper is published in Nature Neuroscience, although you need a subscription to read more than the précis.

Neuroscience of art appreciation

2012-02-07T09:56:00.000+11:00

It's an old question: What is art? What is "good" art? Do you love the art because it appeals to you or just because it's in an art gallery? It's not just about beauty, because some of the world's most famous artworks are quite ugly or horrific.

There's also the question of "real" art versus "fakes". Is the art of any less value if the brush was wielded by one of Rembrandt's students rather than the master himself? Does knowing whether a work is authentic add to your appreciation?

The new ABC Radio National show, Books & Arts Daily, recently ran an interview with Professor Martin Kemp about his research with neuroscientists into how the brain responds to "authentic" and "fake" art. Listen here. Fascinating!

Just a drop in the ocean

2012-01-12T11:45:00.002+11:00

Click on this link to see some of Hans Maier's amazing new photographs of water droplets. The forms and colours he captures are beautiful and often resemble other shapes that are found in nature. It's another example of the way organic forms are repeated at all scales throughout the universe, from the microscopic to the telescopic and larger.

Biocouture

2012-01-05T14:34:00.000+11:00

When author Suzanne Lee met Dr David Hepworth—a biologist and materials scientist—in 2003, their conversation led to an amazing concept in fashion: one that emerges fully-formed from a vat of liquid.

The raw material for BioCouture is bacteria that spin microfibrils of pure cellulose during fermentation. The resulting layer can be harvested and dried then molded on a 3D form or cut and sewn like normal fabric.

As well as presenting the beginnings of an eco-friendly alternative to synthetic fabric manufacture, the garments Suzanne creates show once again how science and art can intermingle. View the Biocouture blog here.

One part inspiration

2011-11-16T14:14:00.001+11:00

I encourage you to visit the gallery of images from Princeton University's annual Art of Science competition, 2011. You'll be amazed and fascinated to see what comes out of biology, physics and engineering labs.

Thanks to Eugenie Scott for bringing this to my attention.

Communications 6

2011-11-15T12:24:00.000+11:00

This scattering of bicone AB green glass beads on silk organza is the overlay for the Communications artwork, which is now almost complete. Below is an image of the two layers together. Next step is to mount the piece ready for framing, then I can add it to the collection.

Communications 5

2011-11-14T12:21:00.000+11:00

Finished metallic echo stitching on the Communications background. This mesh of intertwined lines of stitching represents the network of neural pathways in the brain, inspired by research at the Queensland Brain Institute.

Communications 4

2011-11-11T11:33:00.000+11:00

Now that I'm happy with the coverage of the background of Communications, I'm using this orange metallic filament to echo the lines of stitching and add a bit of depth. Like many metallic threads, this one can be tricky to work with as it frays, splits and snags. Oh, what one must suffer for art's sake! More pics of the work soon.

By the way, the exhibition is still up in the Accelerator Gallery at Culture at Work for another week and a bit. The gallery is open by appointment, so call Culture at Work on 02 9518 8813 if you'd like to see it.

X-ray art

2011-11-10T11:41:00.000+11:00

My friend and frequent inspiration Cherie came to visit the Kingdom of the Blind exhibition, and told me about an artist she'd recently discovered who works embroidery over X-rays. Of course I had to check it out (and you should too). Matthew Cox's idea is to take an internal image and apply a new surface to it. I love this way of looking at the idea of personality and identity.

Communications 3

2011-11-04T15:18:00.000+11:00

Yesterday's work on Communications has almost brought it to the stage where I am happy with the network of stitching for the background. I've pencilled in a couple more lines, and I can still see a few gaps to be filled, but it's almost there. I should finish the embroidery today, and may have time to complete the overlay and thus the whole piece on Saturday--the last day I'll be in the gallery (from 2pm to 5pm).

The exhibition will still be up for a week after that, but the gallery will only be open by appointment. I'd love to show you my works, so please call Culture at Work if you'd like to come along next week.

Communications 2

2011-11-03T15:17:00.000+11:00

As I'm sitting in the Accelerator gallery each day--in between chatting to visitors who trickle in--I am gradually adding more lines of stitching to the network that will form the background to the new Communication piece based on the work of Associate Professor Meunier at QBI. Here is the work in progress from yesterday. I am enjoying the colours and textures of both hand-dyed and solid colour cottons, lurex threads, silks and braids. The aim is to work up a dense network of lines across the work, then make an organza overlay with bright green beads, similar to the work Neurogenesis after ischemia.

Communications

2011-11-02T03:14:00.000+11:00

This is a new piece I've been working on while sitting in the gallery during opening hours this week. It's a privilege to meet everyone who has dropped in to see the show: I've had some really interesting conversations. One visitor shared some details of his father's Alzheimer's disease as he looked at my images of Apoptosis. Yesterday I met one of the victims of the Bali bombing who told me about how she had used art as therapy to help her through seven horrific operations on her leg (she showed me the scar). Please drop in if you can and share your experiences or just say hello!

Opening day, October 29th

2011-11-01T15:13:00.000+11:00

Celebrating the exhibition opening...

Hanging the exhibition 3

2011-10-28T11:30:00.000+11:00

All set up: there's a small bench just inside the door where I can sit and work at my embroidery while the gallery is open, which means visitors can see the process that goes into making my artworks.

The banners are out, ready for the first visitors to arrive. I hope to see you at 6 Scott Street, Pyrmont, one day during the next week.

Hanging the exhibition 2

2011-10-27T11:30:00.000+11:00

Quite a bit of discussion was required before we could decide exactly where each of the 10 works were to be hung. I'm very lucky that Alexandra was prepared to consider my opinion and offer her own experience and advice on how the art should be displayed. The final result is very pleasing, although you'll have to come and see it for yourself to decide if you agree.

Getting the lighting right took a lot of patience, not to mention ladder-climbing!

Hanging the exhibition 1

2011-10-26T06:30:00.000+11:00

This week we've been hanging the Kingdom of the Blind exhibition in the Accelerator gallery space at Culture at Work. The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 29th and runs for a week. Here are some photographs of the behind-the-scenes work.

Gallery manager Alexandra Sideris, who scrubbed, spackled and painted the walls in preparation for the show.

One of the works in situ -- watch out for those reflections!

Alexandra and Culture at Work CEO Sherryl Ryan discuss the logistics.

Communications in the brain 2

2011-10-25T10:56:00.000+11:00

This gorgeous image is from a study by Associate Professor Frederic Meunier of the Queensland Brain Institute on the way neurons communicate with each other in the brain. Associate Professer Meunier has graciously allowed me to use this image as the basis for a new piece of embroidery. I am already dreaming of the hand-dyed orange silks and luminous green beads that I will use as part of this work.

Unfortunately, it won't be ready for my exhibition next week, but if you come to the gallery during opening hours you might get to see me working on it.

Communications in the brain 1

2011-10-24T10:35:00.000+11:00

Last week I attended the CHAST Templeton lecture by Joe leDoux, author of The Emotional Brain. He discussed his experiments on the fear response in rats, but I was struck by the way he explained the workings of the amygdala: when the amygdala receives scary sensory input it sends out signals to various parts of the brain that cause reflexes and other actions to kick in. There is lots of communication from the amygdala to the part of the brain that makes you react to fear, but there is barely any communication (in either direction) between the amygdala and the pre-frontal lobe, where conscious thinking takes place. Therefore, leDoux says, it's no wonder that it's so much easier for emotions to control our actions than it is for our reason to control our emotions.

That makes so much sense!

Exhibition: please come!

2011-10-22T10:52:00.000+11:00

Last month I mentioned that there will be new Kingdom of the Blind exhibition at Culture at Work opening on October 29th and running for one week.

In case you can't read the invitation above, the exhibition is at 6 Scott Street, Pyrmont. The opening hours are Saturday 29th October and Sunday 30th October, 2 to 5pm; Monday 31st October to Thursday 3rd November, 4 to 7pm; and Saturday 5th November, 2 to 5pm. If you are planning to come to the opening on Saturday 29th, can you please let me know either by commenting below or on Facebook? Otherwise, you're welcome any time.

Nervous?

2011-10-18T11:11:00.000+11:00

I have discovered a site called Spoonflower, where anyone can upload designs for printed fabric. Each week there is a theme, and you can vote for your favourites. The designs that get the most votes are printed and the fabric can be purchased from the site. I did a search using the tag "brain" and it came up with pages of fabric choices, including the one above, called "Nervous" and designed by Chris. Cute!

Golden moments

2011-10-12T11:50:00.001+11:00

Thanks to Jessica at Bioephemera, I recently found the work of the amazing artist Greg Dunn, whose paintings of neurons and other brain structures are beautifully juxtaposed with similar works showing tree branches, grasses and other natural forms. I have blogged before about the similarities of natural structures on the microscopic and macroscopic scales, and Greg's gorgeous golden paintings really demonstrate the similarities well.

The emotional brain

2011-10-08T15:04:00.000+11:00

The annual Templeton lecture at the University of Sydney next week is entitled "The emotional brain". It's free and open to the public. If you've got a brain and you want to learn more about it, come along.

Experimenting on a human

2011-10-06T16:16:00.000+11:00

So far, the images I've used to inspire my embroidered works have been of the brains of smaller mammals like rats and mice. While some of the images supplied by Dr Adam Hamlin and his colleagues have been of living creatures, most of the subjects have been, sadly, deceased. This is a common problem in neuroscience: you can't simply open up a skull and watch the brain at work in vivo. Magnetic resonance imaging is one way of looking at the details of a living brain, although the problem of keeping the subject still for long enough to get a decent amount of detail continues to limit the usefulness of the machines.

When a friend recently had an MRI for medical reasons, I jumped at the chance to perform my stitching experiment on a living brain, and a human brain at that. I am looking at this work as a cross between a very intimate portrait of my friend, and an investigation into understanding the science behind magnetic resonance imaging and what it can show us about the insides of our skulls.

Here's the work in progress.

When brains go wrong...

2011-10-04T15:14:00.003+11:00

Last weekend I attended several events at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Among many interesting speakers was Jon Ronson, whose latest book is The Psychopath Test: an investigation into the world of abnormal psychology that started when he was asked to follow up a mysterious treatise that had been mailed to a neurologist in London. He was a funny and self-deprecating speaker, presenting himself as a modern-day Jerome K Jerome who, by the time he'd read a few chapters of the psychiatric manual, had diagnosed himself with a dozen mental ailments. He talked about the difficulty of diagnosis in cases of madness and mental illness; he (wisely, I think) steered clear of neurology and concentrated on psychology, which kept the subject approachable but left me wanting to run back to Lone Frank's Mindfield for more information.

I bought the book. The first chapter concludes with this illustration of the title of his Opera House talk: Psychopaths Make the World Go Round.

"Aren't you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man's brain? It's as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere."

You can also see a clip of an interview with Jon Ronson by ABC television's Leigh Sales here.

News and newsletter

2011-09-29T13:26:00.002+10:00

The latest newsletter from Culture at Work is out, and it contains an announcement of a new Kingdom of the Blind exhibition opening October 29, 2011.

I've just sent four new works to the framers, inspired by Dr Adam Hamlin's gorgeous images of rodent brains and research into the birth and death of neurons, as well as some of his earlier work on addiction and dreaming. Another new work, inspired by a QBI bookmark featuring an image of cell birth by DanaKai Bradford, is also included in the show.

The works will be for sale, and I'm hoping to have a book of photographs of the works available too. Keep your eyes on the blog or subscribe to the newsletter for more information closer to the opening date.

Sea creatures

2011-09-02T18:33:00.001+10:00

From the New Yorker magazine.

Watching Europa

2011-07-21T11:54:00.004+10:00

I'm pretty busy with another project at the moment but staying in touch with Culture at Work via the newsletter. Fiona Davies's work with silk fibre and red dye is amazing, as was the interesting presentation she made with Dr Peter Domachuk, whose work with silk biomedical implants is definitely something to watch in the future.

In the meantime, I can't resist sharing a new combination of art and science with you. Last year I discovered the ethereally haunting music of Peter Miller's Perpetual Ocean project, including a series of six one-hour compositions called Strangeness + Charm.

Peter has just started up a new project called Scribbletronics, and his first artwork in progress is the amazing Watching Europa. It's an imaginary exploration of the possibility of life in the oceans on Saturn's water-covered moon. Here's a thousand words to describe it:

Wow! (Okay, a thousand and one words.)

Belladonna

2011-04-07T15:53:00.003+10:00

At the recent Artist and Scientist talk at Culture at Work, I met Beth Josey. She's a friend of a friend, a scientist who works in heart research and an artist. Her latest exhibition, at Hardware Gallery in Marrickville, Sydney, is great.

Stark black and white linocut prints of normally colourful subjects such as Easter lilies and redback spiders explore the counterintuitive relationship between beauty and toxicity. Really worth checking out.

Brain Art Unconference

2011-03-01T11:34:00.000+11:00

Starting in two days is the first annual brain art exhibition and unconference in Sydney. Featured artist Julie Doye and other young artists will be exhibiting their brain art, while the unconference includes sessions on thinking, feeling, creating, loving and living with your brain.

Visit the website for more details, or visit the exhibition at Global Gallery, 5 Comber Street, Paddington.

How evolution (doesn't) work

2011-02-16T10:15:00.002+11:00

Last night my son and I were discussing the fact that, in general, women seem to sleep more lightly than men and speculating that this might be an evolutionary development because women need to wake during the night to care for a baby. Max wondered whether that will change in the future, now that men – in some cases – take more responsibility for night-time child care (although biologically they still can't do all of it).

This led to a discussion about evolution, and how adaptations aren't necessarily the best possible way of dealing with a situation, but only the most successful way of surviving. And here's a case in point:

An article in Scientific American reports that researchers have found a protein in the brains of mice that inhibits long-term memory formation. This protein is also, apparently, found in humans. The researchers knocked out the gene for the protein in some mice and found that the knockout mice were smarter than their normal peers. (Sound familiar?) Note that the researchers are not sure about any possible negative side effects of knocking out this protein yet, so Charlie is still working in the bakery for now.

This raises a question: why would we evolve to produce a protein in our brain that makes us dumber? The answer is that evolution happens more or less at random, not with any intention to design the best possible human being. Of course, being smarter would be better for our survival, but being as smart as we are has worked well enough to be successful. Until now.

Algernon and Charlie's (fictional) experience notwithstanding, my next question is, where do I sign up to knock out my dumbing-down genes? As I get older, I need all the help with my memory that I can get.

Music in your genes

2011-01-20T14:46:00.001+11:00

Here's an interesting combination of art and science: gene2music. Hear the rhythm of the gene sequence for Huntington's disease, or the song that allows E. coli to break through a bacterial membrane. Sheet music is also provided.

For those with a little musical knowledge, you can read a description of how it's done.

Thanks to Leslie Cannold for drawing my attention to this.

Floods at University of Queensland

2011-01-19T14:21:00.003+11:00

The map below from nearmap.com shows the St Lucia campus of UQ, Brisbane, at the height of the recent floods. The Queensland Brain Institute is, fortunately, on higher ground than some of the recreation areas and older buildings on campus (you can spot the QBI just above the green sports field at the centre bottom of the map). Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the floods in Brisbane, and I encourage you to make a donation to the Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal if you want to show your support.

View Large Map

Why has science failed?

2010-12-16T12:02:00.000+11:00

"Why has science failed to banish belief in the supernatural?" That's the opening sentence of Dr Adam Hamlin's article, The Neurobiology of Religious Experience, in the new Australian Book of Atheism, edited by Warren Bonett (Scribe Publications, 2010).

The book is available from Warren's online bookstore, Embiggen Books, from the publisher Scribe Publications, or from selected bookstores around Australia. As well as Adam's contribution to the section on neuroscience, the book has chapters from noted public figures including Dr Leslie Cannold, Jane Caro, radio's Robyn Williams, Dr Philip Nitschke, Lyn Allison, Lee Rhiannon and many more, covering atheism and its effect on life, politics, education, society and philosophy.

A quiet week, or quite a week

2010-12-15T11:44:00.002+11:00

Lots happening in my life this week, so not a lot happening on Kingdom of the Blind. This morning, however, I made the discovery of a blog I haven't read before: Neuroskeptic. If you're interested in neuroscience, this blog is well-written and quite accessible to a layperson.

I especially like the recent post about why mice are the kings of the lab these days. Having heard all about their nasty habits from Dr Adam Hamlin, I've come to realise that the intelligent little critter in Flowers for Algernon is much more realistic when he bites Charlie than when he cuddles him.

The sentiments expressed by Daniel Keyes in his book are echoed by Jim Endersby, in the final chapter of the book that inspired the title of this blog:

Now that we have the knowledge to intervene so effectively in the engineering of living things, we need to ask whether we have the wisdom to use such power wisely.*

*A Guinea Pig's History of Biology (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Lost? You may have Alzheimer's

2010-12-08T12:29:00.003+11:00

The latest news release from the Queensland Brain Institute reveals new research into the part of the brain that controls our sense of direction (shown in red in the image). This part of the brain is often damaged in Alzheimer's disease, so the researchers hypothesise that an impaired sense of direction could be an early warning sign that could help with diagnosis of this slippery condition.

Music and science

2010-12-07T13:05:00.000+11:00

I discovered the Symphony of Science project a while ago, and I can't think why I haven't shared it with you before. Musician John Boswell uses autotune software to set sound and video clips of well-known scientists and philosophers to music. Pearls of wisdom from Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking feature in this composition:

The latest in the series, A Wave of Reason begins with Bertrand Russell and includes several modern thinkers including Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait.

Cell birth

2010-12-06T08:49:00.001+11:00

I had a couple of hours to spare in the Culture at Work studio this week, so I began another embroidery I've had in mind for a while, based on an image of cell birth that appears on a Queensland Brain Institute bookmark.

The neurons, with their tendrils stretching out to make new connections, look rather sperm-like, which is appropriate when we're talking about the birth of brain cells. What will they develop into as they grow and age? What thoughts will pass along those tendrils?

The beautiful blue and green fluorescent markers used to reveal the cell structures are a lovely colour combination. The thread I'm using is hand-dyed stranded cotton, and the whole work will be in padded satin stitch when it's done; at the moment I'm just working the outlines in outline stitch (I've satin stitched one tendril at the top of the image below).

QBI newsletter

2010-12-03T17:42:00.000+11:00

Click here to download a PDF of the latest newsletter from the Queensland Brain Institute.

Bizarre bioscapes

2010-12-02T17:00:00.001+11:00

I'm pleased to present this amazing image of a rat's hippocampus by Thomas Deerinck. It's a widefield multiphoton fluorescence image stained to reveal the distribution of glia (cyan), neurofilaments (green) and cell nuclei (yellow). Thomas Deerinck works at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego, USA. This image won second prize in the 2010 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®.

Each year for the past seven, Olympus (the camera manufacturer) has run a digital imaging competition for those working in life sciences. Any human, animal or plant subject is allowed, and the images are selected and judged on the science they represent, the aesthetics of the picture and the technical proficiency of the photographer. All of the ten winning images are stunning: you can see them and many highly commended images at the Olympus BioScapes website.

Can you pick out the shape of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus (as in my Neurogenesis embroidery below) in Deerinck's prizewinning image? Looking at all those gorgeous colours, my fingers are itching to start a new embroidery!

Flowers for Algernon

2010-12-01T17:24:00.000+11:00

Flowers for Algernon sequence

2010-11-30T17:12:00.000+11:00

Eight purple flowers.

Five pink flowers.

Three yellow flowers, two orange flowers and a red flower.

Blue flowers for Algernon

2010-11-29T15:12:00.000+11:00

Fibonacci flowers 2

2010-11-26T15:04:00.000+11:00

Thirty-four pale green flowers cover the background maze, interspersed with 21 dark green flowers. The next colour to be added will be cyan (13 flowers).

Did you figure out the Fibonacci sequence? (Or did you look it up on Wikipedia?) Each new number is the result of adding the previous two numbers together, starting with zero and one. Simple, but effective.

Fibonacci flowers

2010-11-25T14:39:00.000+11:00

The Flowers for Algernon embroidery is back on the worktable. As illustrated in yesterday's blog post, I plan to stitch a profusion of coloured flowers over the maze background, symbolising both the literal flowers that Charlie left on Algernon's grave in the story, and the way those flowers stand as a signifier of the idea of memory and loss in the book. The flowers will be worked in lazy daisy stitch with French knot centres, using the same coloured threads as I used in the Axonal connections embroidery.

Usually when I start to fill a space with stitches, I don't plan too far ahead, but simply apply the needle and thread and see where the embroidery takes me. This time, I decided in advance how many flowers of each colour I would stitch (although I left the placement of the flowers to the whim of the moment). I used the Fibonacci sequence, in reverse, to calculate progressively fewer flowers of each colour, starting with light green (34 flowers) and working back to red (1 flower). There's no real reason why I chose the Fibonacci sequence, except that it represents a natural looking progression. The sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on.

If you don't know it, can you work out the mathematical basis of the progression? (Answer tomorrow, or on Wikipedia.)

Art and mathematics

2010-11-24T04:36:00.001+11:00

Yesterday I visited Sydney's Powerhouse Museum where two books linking mathematics and art were launched. A Maths Odyssey, beautifully illustrated by Matt Huynh, traces the history of mathematics from Euclid to quantum mechanics. The other is a collection of works from students of the Thinking Hyperbolically! course at International Grammar School in Sydney. The students used mathematical concepts such as data mapping, ciphers and parabolas to create visual masterpieces such as those pictured here.

You'll have to forgive me for a little parental pride in this post, since my 15-year-old son is a member of the class.

Visual journal entry

2010-11-23T14:22:00.000+11:00

On my reading list

2010-11-22T12:50:00.000+11:00

This book, to be published in Australia next year by Text Publishing, is so going onto my to-read pile. Just underneath Swann's Way.

In the meantime, I'll keep reading the author's blog, The Frontal Cortex.

The end of the path

2010-11-19T10:56:00.001+11:00

I spent yesterday in the Culture at Work studio, making the last few lines of stitching on the Paths of Dreams embroidery, shown above beside Dr Adam Hamlin's image of neuronal pathways in a dreaming rat's brain. A detail of the stitching is below: the thread I used is Gumnut Yarns Stars (hand-dyed variegated stranded silk). The lines of stitching are running stitch, stem stitch, outline stitch, chain stitch and padded satin stitch, as well as some whipped back stitch and running stitch. I varied between using one or two strands of silk, so the "pathways" have different textures and tones.

The first thing people ask when I tell them what this work is based on is, "What do rats dream about?" Mazes, I reply, and cocaine.

Culture at Work exhibition

2010-11-18T10:48:00.003+11:00

Beyond/In WNY

2010-11-17T13:32:00.000+11:00

More inspiration for restarting work on my Flowers for Algernon embroidery came from a great exhibition I saw in Buffalo, NY, called Beyond/In WNY.

The works of more than 100 artists in various media were on display, and they are well worth seeing if you're in the area. At University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery, I loved Rodney Taylor's slowly disintegrating paintings of trees and landscapes, and getting back to the wilderness with Elinor Whidden's broken-up macho cars. Kurt von Voetsch's exploration of his concept of self through his brain cancer treatment was very moving.

The three artists exhibiting at the WNY Book Arts Center made me laugh and cry at the same time with their subtle and not-so-subtle digs at modern culture and life.

At Buffalo Arts Studio, as well as viewing the exhibited works we were invited to walk through the studio spaces of several other artists. None were at work at the time, but it was interesting to see where art is created, and how other artists organise their studio space (or not). Which reminds me to say, that anyone in the Sydney area is welcome to visit me in the Culture at Work studio at 6 Scott Street, Pyrmont. You'll need to make an appointment -- I'm usually there on Tuesdays but other days can be arranged -- and I'd be happy to show my embroideries and generally chat about creativity, science and Culture at Work. If you'd like to arrange a visit, email me by clicking on my name in the column at right.

A-maize-ing inspiration

2010-11-16T13:12:00.000+11:00

I recently visited my sister and her family in the northern hemisphere where it is autumn (fall), and we visited Ressler's Maize Maze near Arcade, NY. Here's my gorgeous nephew heading off to explore the corn maze.We had lots of fun getting lost among the cornstalks. The family who open this maze each year make it more enjoyable by including question clues that give you a brain workout as well. A signpost at one junction asked, "Which is larger, 400 square inches or four square feet?" which was quite difficult for my sister and me, who think in centimetres most of the time; another queried, "Is the tongue an organ?" We argued about that one for several minutes until my brother-in-law resorted to googling it on his Blackberry. He was correct, and I had to admit defeat.

It wasn't really anything particular about the corn maze that led to me being inspired to work on my Flowers for Algernon embroidery again, but it's amazing how exercising your brain and body leads to increased creativity!

Flowers for Algernon revisited

2010-11-15T12:37:00.002+11:00

This work was begun very early in the Kingdom of the Blind project, when I reread the book Flowers for Algernon and was thinking about the application of experiments on mice to help us understand human brains. I showed the work, unfinished, at the Culture at Work exhibition in May, but it's been hanging in the studio ever since, waiting for me to be inspired to complete it.

The inspiration for making art is an unknown quantity: sometimes creativity strikes and a work is completed easily and with little effort. This is what happened with most of the other works I've created as part of this residency, even the ones that took many hours of stitching. This maze, on the other hand, started with a burst of inspiration, but then I lost my way through it (pun intended).

I made some effort to finish the work for the exhibition, but I wasn't happy with the result, and recently I unpicked those stitches because they were really just cluttering up the image. I've given it some thought over the past couple of months while I was busy working on other things, but I just couldn't come up with any inspiration to make the next stitch.

The corner, however, has been turned and I can now see my way ahead. I'll post some images over the next few days to share the journey, and I hope to find time to make some progress on the work itself this week too!

Identifying Alzheimer's

2010-11-11T13:41:00.001+11:00

This morning's Sydney Morning Herald ran an article from the New York Times on several studies that are trying to discover the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease. One study is on a family group in Colombia whose members often carry a genetic mutation that guarantees that they will develop Alzheimer's, usually in their 40s. The leaders of this project are trying to identify the very earliest brain changes so that they can develop more effective treatments and possibly preventions. The question that must be asked, however, is whether successful identification and treatment in this population can be applied to sufferers of other forms of Alzhiemer's disease.

Several months ago I listened to an interview with Dr Peter Whitehouse, co-author of the book The Myth of Alzheimer's, on Dr Ginger Cambell's Brain Science podcast #68. Dr Whitehouse takes issue with the use of Alzheimer's disease as a blanket name for many different types of dementia, and wonders whether the widespread use of the term obscures the truth about the range of brain changes that it covers.

All well-conducted scientific research adds to our overall understanding, there's no question about that. The results of the Colombian study will be interesting, and it will be great if they are more widely applicable. At the very least, I hope they will allow for a better quality of life for those carrying the specific genetic mutation that casts such a gloomy shadow over this particular family group.

Panic

2010-11-10T12:11:00.003+11:00

I know my fear of large hairy spiders is somewhat irrational. The huntsman spiders that I really dislike are mostly harmless and often more scared of me than I am of them, while I'm quite content to be within a few inches of a deadly redback spider (they can't move very fast on those little spindly legs, can they?) But the big, hairy, eight-legged beasts really give me the creeps -- possibly because of occasionally sharing a bedroom with a massive specimen or two when I was growing up on our farm.

Therefore, I will not be volunteering for an experiment like this one, because I really don't need an MRI to tell me that the panic centres in my brain would light up if I saw a tarantula crawling towards my feet.

Hiatus in the path

2010-11-09T17:10:00.004+11:00

Paths of Dreams has been sitting on the shelf in the Culture at Work studio for several weeks now, waiting for me to return my attention to creating art rather than making money to pay the bills. I only had a short time to work on it today, just adding a few more neural pathways to the growing forest of dream trails. I feel that this work will be finished soon; you can see the last few white pencil lines I've marked in to stitch next time I'm in the studio.

Apologies for the poor quality image, I took this on my mobile phone camera.

The Yipping Tiger

2010-09-20T12:57:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I finished reading The Yipping Tiger, a book I bought after seeing the author, Dr Perminder Sachdev, in a session at Sydney Writers' Festival. The final chapter discusses cognitive decline and dementia related to ageing, and gives this useful summary:

Unfortunately, age does lead to brain changes. Many older brains have changes that resemble those seen in Alzheimer's disease but do not show the full picture of the disorder. It can be debated whether this is simply very early disease that will eventually show up in the clinic, but even in the presence of these changes, the neuronal numbers are not reduced. It seems that nerve cells do not die with age. What seems most likely is that their networks become less efficient.... A typical neuron has one large fibre called the axon and a number of smaller branches called dendrites, which further branch and subbranch into a dendritic tree. These dendrites link the neuron to other neurons, forming a vastly complex network. The dendrites carry small protrusions like mushroom heads that are smaller than a micrometre and can be seen only by special microscopes. All principal neurons in the brain carry these spines on their dendrites and, for some nerve cells, these can number in the tens of thousands. They form links with spines of other neurons in junctions called synapses through which information flows from one neuron to another.... It has been shown that with ageing, the dendritic spines become less dense. There are other changes as well, especially in relation to the synapses.

Sculpture of a neuron by Roxy Paine,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, May 2010.

Forensic science and art

2010-09-17T17:02:00.002+10:00

As an artist exploring the world through the eyes of a scientist, I'm interested in others who take a different approach to their exploration. At the moment, I wish I could get to Ealing in the UK to see an exhibition called Revealing Evidence.

Textile artist Shelly Goldsmith and Photographer Sarah Pickering explore the working methods and thought processes of forensic scientists, to fill their work with stories and imagined scenarios. Together, the work illustrates the extent to which both scientists and artists, working in very different practices, build pictures, construct scenarios and make assumptions.

Welcome to the kingdom of the blind, Shelly and Sarah!

My next embroidery...

2010-09-15T09:29:00.000+10:00

What does Alzheimer's look like in your brain?

Amazing...

Cognitive decline linked to famine in utero

2010-09-14T21:02:00.002+10:00

In the Netherlands at the end of World War II, a five-month famine was the result of blockades by the German army. Rations dropped as low as 1600 kJ (400 calories) per day! This has enabled researchers to conduct long-term studies into the health effects of reduced nutrition, particularly in babies who were in utero during this period. A study at age 19 showed no cognitive differences, but a more recent study now that the people are in their fifties showed that those who suffered famine, particularly in the early stages of gestation, do show more decline than their non-famine-affected peers.

See Discover's 80 beats blog for a more in-depth analysis of the study.

This is handmade

2010-09-13T11:06:00.002+10:00

The most often asked question about my embroidery works is, "How long did it take you to stitch that?". Penny Nickels is also a stitcher (along with her husband, Johnny Murder, aka the Manbroiderer) who has been asked this question a lot. She was also tired of people who baulked at the prices of her incredibly intricate and beautiful works, such as Haeckel's Siphonophorae (in progress, below).

So Penny created a website in which artists are invited to share five-minute videos of themselves doing their work: not talking, or giving a tutorial, but simply sitting and stitching, or sawing, painting, cutting out, etc. The theory behind the site is,

"If you can't sit through 5 minutes of mind-numbingly boring ass handwork, then you don't get to whine about how much it costs. It's just as tedious for us as it is for the viewer. It really is.
And we don't get health insurance."

Click on the link to watch some of the videos. They are mind-numbingly boring, but also educational.

Neurosexism

2010-09-09T13:26:00.003+10:00

Today's Sydney Morning Herald newspaper ran an article from The Observer which attempts to debunk the myth that differences between the sexes is hard-wired into the human brain. Associate Professor Lise Eliot, interviewed for the article, says that too much emphasis is placed on very minor developmental differences (three per cent or less) between male and female brains, when we should be focussing on the overwhelming similarities. Drawing too much attention to the differences leads to enlarging them by socialising girls and boys differently, in the manner of the Venus/Mars dichotomy popularised by John Gray. "Pernicious pinkification of little girls" is the way the article describes it.

"There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience," Lise Eliot says.

Right brain, left brain II

2010-09-08T13:06:00.000+10:00

I recently discussed the issue of duality of the brain and our ever-increasing knowledge of the way the two hemispheres work, separately and together. The traditional understanding of right brain for art and left brain for science is beautifully illustrated in the works above by artist Don Stewart. Stewart trained as a medical doctor before quitting a surgical internship to devote his time to art and writing. His drawings, made using a ballpoint pen, reveal a deep understanding of anatomy and physiology combined with a quirky sense of humour.

Visit his website and choose your favourite. (I like the one called "Quack".)

Of mice and men and worms

2010-09-07T12:45:00.000+10:00

Wilberforce (supposedly) asked Huxley, in their famous debate on The Origin of Species, "Is it on your grandfather's or grandmother's side that you claim descent from a monkey?" Wonder how he would have felt if he read this report about a study of gene expression in the brain that points to the existence of a common ancestor of both mammals and worms about 580 million years ago?

Imagining the brain

2010-09-06T10:15:00.001+10:00

I stumbled across this brain art exhibition from high school students in Cambridge, UK. The organisers of the annual competition say:

Imagining the Brain is:
A dialogue about science, especially neuroscience
An artistic expression of science and its wider implications.

The themes for works submitted in 2010 were "Diversity or Disorder" and "[St]Ages of the Brain". Click on the link above to see the gallery of submissions from local teenagers, along with some of the judges' comments: there's a lot of food for thought.

SAX on the brain

2010-09-03T05:37:00.000+10:00

If you're in Sydney, please check out my friend Ian Saxby's science-inspired artworks at his show on Saturday, September 11th. The show is at 2pm, at Derivan, Unit 4/23 Leeds Street, Rhodes. One of the works on display will be his brainy painting, Beelzebub, that I've featured in this blog before.

Dream on, daydreamers

2010-09-02T10:00:00.003+10:00

An article from the New York Times reports that electronic multitasking is making us dumber. By filling every idle moment with mental input and sensory stimuli of all kinds, we're reducing our brains' downtime. (I recently wrote about a similar article extolling the virtues of daydreaming.) It is becoming apparent that we need the occasional zoning-out zone to absorb information and lay down long-term memories. Nature walks, apparently, are much better for you than a stroll down a city street.

Bushwalk, anyone?

Left brain, right brain

2010-09-01T14:36:00.002+10:00

The latest neuroscience book on my reading list is The Yipping Tiger, by Perminder Sachdev. (You may recall that he was on a panel with Lone Frank that I attended during this year's Writers' Festival.) In chapter two, discussing a man who chooses to have the two halves of his brain disconnected to combat debilitating epilepsy, Dr Sachdev writes:

The strange behaviour of Robert's left hand takes one on a long journey of the concept of the double-brain that began in its rudimentary form with the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and reached its zenith in the debates of the classical neurologists of the nineteenth century.... The double-brain theory was a potent source of psychological theorising in the nineteenth century, some of which was the consequence of over-enthusiastic leaps of logic.

....Was there indeed a double consciousness or a duality of mind after all? Or was it more fruitful to conceptualise it in terms of specialisation in the brain, with the coordinated activity in these regions laying the foundation for an individual's personality and consciousness? Was the right/left difference the basis for the two dichotomies of existence: rational and emotive–intuitive, propositional and appositional, yin and yang, science and art? The debates that followed were fertile ground for a range of ideas on politics, culture, society, arts and philosophy, which I will not discuss here.

Many people express surprise when I talk about the Kingdom of the Blind project combining my interests in art and science, because the received wisdom is that those subjects are located on different sides of the brain and one must be dominant over the other, or possibly even preclude the other. I hope that one of the results of my work on this project is that it makes people reassess their assumptions about the human brain and how it works.

On a related note, you can listen to this week's Skeptoid podcast, in which Brian Dunning discusses the commonly used Myers-Briggs personality test and its attempts to divide people into two opposing categories (extrovert/introvert, rational/intuitive, etc). Food for thought!

Dreams VI

2010-08-31T16:04:00.003+10:00

This picture shows the Paths of Dreams work after today's stitching. I've had to mark the gap between the two lobes of the images to remind me not to get carried away and fill it with stitches! The images below show the progress of the work since I began it. I estimate it has taken about 12 hours so far.

Coming soon to a venue near you...

2010-08-30T15:37:00.004+10:00

This morning I dismantled the exhibition of my embroideries at Ultimo TAFE during the Science Festival. Next stop, Queensland Brain Institute... then possibly to Embiggen Books on the Sunshine Coast.

Dreams V

2010-08-25T18:13:00.002+10:00

I only had a couple of hours to spare today for a little more work on the Paths of Dreams embroidery, while listening to the latest (23 Aug) episode of the Are We Alone podcast. This episode features an interview with Dr Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics researcher at the University of Reading, England. Dr Warwick has recently succeeded in growing rat brain cells in a laboratory, then using these brain cells to control a simple robot.

Dr Warwick told Are We Alone that he hoped knowing more about learning and memory in this simple synthetic brain would eventually lead to new understanding about human brain diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Dostoyevsky's brain

2010-08-24T14:03:00.002+10:00

I'm rereading Crime and Punishment for my philosophy class, and just beginning The Idiot. The latter book was written by Dostoyevsky during a period of exile, when he frequently suffered from epileptic fits. The introduction to the book says:

"How can it be good when my faculties are utterly shattered by my illness? I have still my imagination, and it isn't a bad one at that; I tested it on my novel the other day. But my memory seems to have gone!" ... he was also overwhelmed by "a feeling of terrible guilt" just as though he had committed "some dreadful crime". But his feeling before the onset of the fit... seemed to compensate him for its terrible aftermath. "For a few moments before the fit," he wrote to the critic Nikolai Strakhov, "I experience a feeling of happiness such as it is quite impossible to imagine in a normal state and which other people have no idea of. I feel entirely in harmony with myself and the whole world, and this feeling is so strong and so delightful that for a few seconds of such bliss one would gladly give up ten years of one's life, if not one's whole life."*

This description aligns with the findings of the researchers using the God helmet, that feelings of bliss and religious transcendence seem to be linked to electrical activity in the frontal lobes of the brain. I am looking forward to seeing what insights Dostoyevsky, by making his main character in The Idiot an epileptic too, gives into the workings of the human brain from his nineteenth-century perspective.

* Quote is taken from the Translator's Introduction to the 1955 Penguin Classics edition of The Idiot.

Being part of the future

2010-08-23T12:34:00.003+10:00

Last night I read the concluding chapter of Mindfield, a book which has taken me on a fascinating journey through the latest developments in neuroscience. The author, Lone Frank, asks a series of questions about how our growing understanding of the brain raises questions about the mind, about the idea of "myself". She asks:

What will define the neurorevolution? As I see it, we are looking at a liberation. The general message wrapped up in the countless research results is a message of freedom. That might sound overblown, but it becomes obvious when you think about what all this brain research is fundamentally doing. It is providing us with unprecedented insight into ourselves. The scanners and artful experiments are pushing us past guesswork, assumptions and vague notions in order to reveal exactly what is hiding deep within this formidable creature Homo sapiens. By exposing human nature, neuroscience makes us able to transcend and rise above it.

In my philosophy class last week, we were discussing Freud's concept of the self and how the modern understanding of psychology and physiology has altered our thinking. A discussion arose between the materialists in the class, who believe that our selves are the products of our physiology interacting with our environment (what Lone Frank calls the habitus of the human mind), and those with a more metaphysical bent, who believe that the self is transcendent: that the sum of our genetic, physiological and psychological parts is less than the whole.

These latter-day transcendentalists believe that studies in neuroscience will never uncover the basic explanation for how we think and why we think the way we do. Yet when you consider the leaps and bounds that neuroscience has made in the past 20 or 30 years, the future possibilities seem almost unlimited. When Crick and Watson first revealed the structure of DNA in the mid-twentieth century, the mapping of the human genome that was completed some fifty years later would have seemed an impossible task. Who is to say that, in fifty or a hundred years time, we won't have a similar map of the human mindfield?

Treading the path gently

2010-08-22T14:50:00.000+10:00

I'm still reading Lone Frank's book, Mindfield: the penultimate chapter is about that almost uniquely human ability – lying. Why we lie, how we lie, how we justify the need to lie, and whether there's any foolproof way of catching someone lying, are all questions that neuroscientists are currently trying to answer. It occurs to me that dreams have such an important place in our culture because we generally believe that they are a window into our unconscious mind, a place where we cannot tell a lie, even to ourselves.

Dream work

2010-08-21T14:49:00.001+10:00

Work is moving right along on my embroidery based on Dr Adam Hamlin's image of neural pathways of dreams (you can see a print of the original image in my visual journal in the top left corner of this photograph). Once again, the repetitive work of stitching the patterns gives me the perfect opportunity to enjoy the winter sunshine, indulge in a few daydreams and listen to music or podcasts like Professor Todd Daniels' Great Ideas in Psychology series, on Sleep, Dreaming and Hypnosis.

I've never been hypnotised, and I don't particularly want to try it, but I've occasionally wondered whether I'd be one of those people who are susceptible.

Paths of Dreams IV

2010-08-20T14:48:00.000+10:00

The early stages of my work "Paths of Dreams", showing the first strands of stitched pathways.

I wanted to do a bit of related reading, and found this old article (from 2001) on studies of dreaming in rats. The article refers to research by Dr Matthew Wilson of MIT, who believes that dreaming may be related to learning and memory, which made me wonder about dreams in people affected by Alzheimer's disease. This led me to reports of a new study (published in the journal Neurology in July 2010) that links dream disorders to later development of dementia. It will be interesting to see whether this research leads to better methods of early diagnosis in the future.

In the news

2010-08-19T14:27:00.002+10:00

Hope you can all go along and see it.

Daydreaming

2010-08-18T14:07:00.006+10:00

I spent several hours in the sun-drenched studio at Culture at Work yesterday, testing out thread and stitch combinations for Paths of Dreams. Here's a combination of the Rajmahal silks (on the right) and the Gumnut silks (on the left) in running stitch, stem stitch, chain stitch and padded satin stitch.

I like the vibrancy of the colour in the Rajmahal silks, while the Gumnut threads seem to hold the stitch shapes better. The variegation in the Gumnut threads is also appealing, as it seems to mimic the light and shade of events in dreams and the cyclical nature of sleep.

Dreamy threads

2010-08-17T18:33:00.001+10:00

I had some Rajmahal Art Silk threads picked out to stitch the Paths of Dreams work, then I found these hand-dyed raw silk threads from Gumnut Yarns. What a dilemma! Which ones should I use, or should I use both? The Rajmahal ones are more vibrant in colour, but these are the same kind of threads as I used to stitch the Neurogenesis series, which would make a nice continuity.

Hanging by a wire

2010-08-16T11:43:00.000+10:00

The exhibition of the Kingdom of the Blind works, part of Ultimo Science Festival, is hung and open to the public. In these pictures, Dani and Brett from Ultimo TAFE help me hang the works in the MUSE.

I'm very pleased with the framing, which was done by Art Scene at West Ryde (I've been getting my work framed there for years now.)

It all looks very professional from the outside.

But it's amazing what you can do with gaffer tape!

Paths of dreams III

2010-08-13T17:37:00.000+10:00

This week I sketched out the initial design for the Paths of Dreams embroidery. I like the fact that Dr Adam Hamlin's original image is roughly in the shape of a footprint, giving a double meaning to the word "paths" in the title. It's as though the neural pathways of the dream are also a figurative path into the unconscious. Is that a bit Freudian for a Friday?

Tests for Alzheimer's disease?

2010-08-12T18:49:00.001+10:00

According to this article in the New York Times, a test of spinal fluid that looks for certain markers of Alzheimer's disease may be able to aid an early diagnosis in people with memory loss.

Alzheimer’s, medical experts now agree, starts a decade or more before people have symptoms. And by the time there are symptoms, it may be too late to save the brain. So the hope is to find good ways to identify people who are getting the disease, and use those people as subjects in studies to see how long it takes for symptoms to occur and in studies of drugs that may slow or stop the disease.

However, the article goes on to raise the question: since we don't have any reliable treatment for the disease, what's the point of undergoing a possibly painful or at least uncomfortable test to confirm that you've got it?

Thanks to Derek Colanduno of Skepticality for directing my attention to this article.

Paths of dreams II

2010-08-11T16:07:00.001+10:00

This is a selection of magenta and hot pink Rajmahal Art Silk threads I've chosen to stitch the Paths of Dreams. At this stage I plan a combination of chain stitch variations, stem stitch and padded satin stitch to create the interlinked neural pathways on a black silk shantung background.

Paths of dreams

2010-08-10T14:58:00.000+10:00

This is another of Dr Adam Hamlin's images, showing the neural pathways of dreams. It reminds me of a poem by e.e. cummings:

Now i lay(with everywhere around)
me(the great dim deep sound
of rain;and of always and of nowhere)and
what a gently welcoming darkestness--

now i lay me down(in a most steep
more than music)feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain

are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)

something which nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring

Carpe diem

2010-08-09T14:43:00.004+10:00

This image popped up as the screen saver on my computer and I wondered why I hadn't shared it with you. You've seen the finished embroidery, but I love the way this shot pulls all the elements of the work in progress together, and the way they all sparkle in the winter sunshine!

Addiction part three

2010-08-06T18:09:00.000+10:00

This is the finished bead work based on cocaine addiction in a rat's brain. The sparkling beads represent the neurons' response to the stimulus of cocaine, showing how the drug gives pleasure and satisfaction. That's very similar to the way the stitching of these beads was like an addiction to me: once I started, I couldn't stop!

Because I am sure I will be asked, I will tell you now that the stitching of this piece took about 32 hours. It was a little faster to complete than the mouse brain in French knots, because the beads are larger and easier to stitch.

Addiction part two

2010-08-05T18:00:00.001+10:00

Dr Adam Hamlin's image of cocaine addiction in a rat's brain inspired me to search out the vibrant beads I'm using for my latest embroidery work. The selection of beads in three basic colour ways (green, red and orange) comprises bugle beads, seed beads, larger round beads and the occasional faceted bead, in clear, translucent, opalescent and opaque finishes. I've jumbled them all together and am choosing the beads at random to stitch onto the fabric. More pics soon!

Comments about my addiction (to beads, threads and fabric rather than cocaine) will be accepted with as much grace as I can muster.

Addicted to stitching

2010-08-04T17:32:00.004+10:00

A few days ago, I was speaking to a publicist about the Ultimo Science Festival exhibition and she asked how the Kingdom of the Blind project got started. I've explained before how Adam and I met through a common interest in astronomy, and discovered another common interest in the beautiful imagery of science.

The image above is the first one that Adam showed me, of his work studying addiction in rats. Although it's been a long time coming to fruition, I've finally started the embroidery based on this image: the first step has been to hand-dye some stranded embroidery cotton, then start covering the background in feather stitch to mimic the feathery tendrils of the neurons in this image.

Ultimo Science Festival

2010-08-03T17:41:00.000+10:00

One of my favourite activities every year in August is to attend the Ultimo Science Festival, which is part of National Science Week. There are always interesting lectures, activities and exhibitions, and this year is even more exciting because Culture at Work has been asked to exhibit the Kingdom of the Blind works.

When: Monday 16 – Sunday 29 August: 10am – 4pm
Where: The Muse, Ultimo TAFE Building C, Harris St
More info: Click here

Daydreaming for the future

2010-08-02T11:07:00.004+10:00

An article in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald argues its case with the old chestnut that I am hereby calling the reductio ad Einsteinium. Einstein was a daydreamer, the author claims, therefore daydreaming must make you smart. To give credit where it is due, the article does go on to say that only some kinds of daydreams make you smart, or is it that smart children tend to daydream to relieve their boredom in class?

Dr Marcus Raichle, of Washington University, postulates that the human brain has a default network that operates when the brain is not receiving outside stimuli, and thinks that activity in this network is related to daydreaming. "It has since been established that this network is impaired in people with autism or Alzheimer's," the article says.

So go ahead and daydream...

Mouse innards in 3D

2010-06-30T13:36:00.000+10:00

Pretty pictures, here, courtesy of Discovery News.

Brains in space

2010-06-24T11:10:00.003+10:00

NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)

One of the latest images from the Hubble Space Telescope is this gorgeous picture of a brain in space. Actually, it's a cloud of star-forming gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and astronomers call it N-11 or the Bean Nebula. The bright blue stars in the image are newborns: you can read more about the image and what it shows at the Hubble site.

Thanks to the Bad Astronomer for pointing out the resemblance to a brain.

The Brain that Changes Itself

2010-06-15T12:32:00.001+10:00

If you're in Australia, here's an interesting program to watch tonight:

The Brain That Changes Itself at 19:30pm, Tuesday 15th June, 2010
Based on the best-selling book by Toronto psychiatrist Dr Norman Doidge, this documentary presents a case for reconsidering how we view the human mind. Dr Doidge travels across the USA to meet some of the pioneering brain researchers. He also visits the people who have been most affected by this research - the patients - people once thought of as incurable who are now living normal lives. (From Canada in English) (Documentary) G CC WS

Find out more at SBS.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him...

2010-06-10T13:03:00.002+10:00

A project at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne has announced that a synthetic brain is about 10 years away. Cool!

Elf5 and breast cancer

2010-06-02T11:09:00.007+10:00

Last night's Tuesday Talk at Culture at Work was by Dr Chris Ormandy of the Garvan Institute in Sydney. He discussed his latest research into breast cancer, with lots of images of gorgeous mouse mammaries (not furry porn, but microscope images of branching milk ducts in mice of various ages and stages of lactation). In particular, we learned about the gene called Elf5 that seems to have a role in switching off the proliferation of cells in the mammary ducts and may therefore be a clue to stopping the growth of cancer.

Once again, I was struck by the resemblance of structure at the microscopic scale to macroscopic features on Earth and in space (I have blogged about this before).

Dr Ormandy showed alveolar proliferations that look like bunches of grapes on a vine or clusters of cherry blossoms on a branch, and branching mammary ducts that looked like river deltas or the root system of a tree. When I asked him about the similarities of the structures at all scales, he said, "It's all about maximising surface area. Whenever you need to transport liquid efficiently around a system, you use a branching formation." (That may not be an exact quote -- I didn't write it down because my hands were full with a glass of wine. Which might be another reason why it's not an exact quote.)

This NASA image is of a Russian river delta in summer: perhaps you are looking at Mother Earth's mammary gland.
NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.

Coffee is good for you

2010-06-01T10:18:00.002+10:00

According to physorg.com, epidemiological and animal studies have shown that caffeine may help prevent neuro-degeneration associated with Alzheimer's disease. This calls for a celebratory cappuccino!

Key findings presented in "Therapeutic Opportunities for Caffeine in Alzheimer's Disease and Other Neurodegenerative Diseases":

* Multiple beneficial effects of caffeine to normalize brain function and prevent its degeneration
* Caffeine's neuroprotective profile and its ability to reduce amyloid-beta production
* Caffeine as a candidate disease-modifying agent for Alzheimer's disease
* Positive impact of caffeine on cognition and memory performance

Via The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Neuropsychiatry

2010-05-25T09:46:00.000+10:00

One of the Writers' Festival sessions with Lone Frank, which I attended, was shared with Dr Perminder Sachdev, author of the book The Yipping Tiger. This is an Oliver Sacks-style memoir about some of the unusual cases he has seen in his clinic (he is currently based at the University of New South Wales). When I was discussing the session with another Festival attendee, she asked me why neuroscience seems to concentrate so much on the abnormal brain. I told her that I believe it is because it has always been so difficult to see a brain when it is working normally. It's only the absences, after a stroke, tumour or major trauma, that reveal to us what parts of the brain are used for which functions. The recent development of fMRI is changing that, though, and enabling neuroscientists to study activity in healthy brains as well as damaged ones.

Dr Sachdev writes:

"We now have tools to image the living and working brain with high precision. Since the 1970s we have arguably learnt more about the human brain than in all the preceding centuries. There are more neuroscientists currently alive than have existed in all of history."

This reminded me of something Dr Adam Hamlin pointed out in his Tuesday Talk at Culture at Work; that almost everything we have learned about the brain we have learned in the past thirty years.

Mindfield

2010-05-24T09:07:00.002+10:00

Lone Frank claims that neuroscience is the "Fifth Revolution" (I'm a bit unclear on what the other four are, but I'm pretty sure the Copernican Revolution and the Industrial Revolution are among them). In her book, Mindfield, she quotes the philosopher Daniel Dennett:

"The next generation of geniuses will appear in brain research. Once it was particle physics that attracted the brightest young people, then it was DNA and genome research, but now it is the neurosciences. Because this is where you can answer the big questions."

In the sessions I attended at the recent Sydney Writers' Festival where Lone shared her experience of researching and writing her book, she challenged the audience to consider themselves, in Francis Crick's words, as "a bag of neurons". She predicts that, with increased understanding of the chemical processes in the brain and of how drugs, magnetism and other treatments can control them, there will soon come a day when we think no more of having treatment to boost our brain function than we currently do of cosmetically altering our appearance or self-medicating to change our mood with alcohol.

A number of people in the audience were disturbed by this prediction. The idea of using artificial means to improve brain function seems a little too much like the creation of a superhuman species. Certainly there are some ethical dilemmas that need to be considered: for example, if we develop a drug that can improve memory, should it only be available for those with cognitive impairment, or for everyone who wants to learn more and better? The question also arises about who should be allowed to judge what is normal; and if such a mind-altering drug were to be put onto the market, will economics and pricing mean that the human race is divided into subclasses: the "smart" rich and the "dumb" poor?

Lone, having had experience of clinical depression and salvation from it using anti-depressants, also raised the question of whether happiness is, or should be, a basic human right. Aristotle said that happiness is the ultimate reason for living, and if we can achieve a happier state using drugs that alter our brain chemistry to change our mood, shouldn't we all be taking them all of the time?

These questions, of course, presently operate on almost a purely philosophical level and the issues of side-effects and long-term success of the drugs (most of which are hypothetical at this stage) were not even canvassed during the sessions. It is important, though, for those of us thinking about brain function, that these issues should be flagged now and debate initiated. If we wait until the technology is already in use, when the patents are already in the hands of the big pharmaceutical companies, it will almost be too late to lodge ethical objections. Let's have some discussion on this subject, here on this blog. What do you think?

fMRI and fiction

2010-05-18T10:37:00.002+10:00

The ABC Radio Book Show talked to an English professor with the lovely appellation Dr Zunshine, who is using fMRI to study how the brain reacts when we read fiction. She talks about our ability to process different levels of mental states: that is, when we know something, it's easy to process, as in "I am tired." Two levels are okay, too: "She knows that I am tired." Three levels: "I want her to think that I am wide awake." Four levels: "He wants me to understand that she thinks that I am awake even though I am actually tired." After this, it gets trickier.

Virginia Woolf, apparently, was the master of this technique, including up to seven levels of mental states in her fiction. No wonder her little thin novels take as long to read as the latest 500-page blockbuster! According to Dr Zunshine, reading fiction is all about brain training, practising the skill of coping with multiple mental states.

I'm not just reading, I'm growing some new neuronal connections.

Putting on the God helmet

2010-05-17T14:25:00.003+10:00

Danish neurobiologist Lone Frank is visiting for Sydney Writers' Festival, and the local broadsheet newspaper ran an article about her book, Mindfield, this past weekend. After donning the "God helmet" which magnetically stimulates the brain to produce a quasi-religious experience, Frank 'makes the case in her book that the world is "on the threshold of a neuroscience revolution".'

Everything we learn about how the brain operates adds to our understanding of what goes on between our ears. Stay tuned for my reports on Frank's Writers' Festival sessions, Brain Wave and Mindfield, that I'll be attending this coming Friday and Sunday.

Deep brain stimulation

2010-05-13T11:06:00.002+10:00

I've been listening to this month's Neuropod podcast, recorded at the recent American Academy of Neurology annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. Presenter Kerri Smith interviews Dr Andres M Lozano, who uses deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat symptoms of Parkinson's disease. This involves implanting an electrode in a damaged area of the brain to encourage it to reactivate, and works on the tremors and movement disorders of Parkinson's. He is now looking at using DBS for mood regulation, such as in cases of depression.

Towards the end of the interview, he talks about possible uses of DBS to treat early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease:

"The next frontier might be to see whether one can regulate memory or cognitive function in the brain; and as we get to have a better understanding of what are the circuits that control memory and cognitive function, we may be in a position to intervene within those circuits, and improve their function as well. On the basis of that thinking, we've started a pilot trial of DBS in treating patients with early Alzheimer's disease. The idea here is to place electrodes within the memory circuits and see whether one can activate the circuits and turn them back on."

He also suggests that this somewhat Frankensteinian technique could be used to spark neurogenesis.

Another story on this edition of Neuropod is about using fMRI imaging to map neural pathways in human brains. This produces amazing images of brains in vibrant coloured fibres: visit The Human Connectome Project to see some.