Neuroscience

In a recent TED presentation, neuroscientist Carl Shoonover shows how our understanding of the brain has changed over history, and how our tools for understanding continue to progress.  Shoonover has also compiled this research into the book, Portraits of the Mind.

There have been remarkable advances in understanding the brain, but how do you actually study the neurons inside it? Using gorgeous imagery, neuroscientist and TED Fellow Carl Schoonover shows the tools that let us see inside our brains.

Schoonover is a neuroscience PhD candidate at Columbia University, where he works on microanatomy and electrophysiology of rodent somatosensory cortex. He the author of Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century.

Portraits of the Mind follows the fascinating history of our exploration of the brain through images, from medieval sketches and 19th-century drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience to images produced using state-of-the-art techniques, allowing us to see the fantastic networks in the brain as never before.


The black-and-white and vibrantly colored images, many resembling abstract art, are employed daily by scientists around the world, but many have never before been seen by the general public. Each chapter addresses a different set of techniques for studying the brain as revealed through the images, and each is introduced by a leading scientist in that field of study. Schoonover’s captions provide detailed explanations of each image as well as the major insights gained by scientists over the course of the past 20 years. This book reveals the elegant methods applied to study the mind, giving readers a peek at its innermost workings, helping us to understand them, and offering clues about what may lie ahead.

Schoonover has also written for the New York Times, Le Figaro, the Huffington Post, Science, Scientific American, Design Observer, and Boing Boing. In 2008 he cofounded NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists, writers, and those in between. He also hosts a radio show on WkCR 89.9FM, which focuses on opera and classical music, and their relationship to the brain.



SOURCE  TED

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square