Brain Imaging | A Beautiful Mind

Broad Overview of a Human Hippocampus | Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman and Joshua Sanes

Fluorescent proteins with confocal microscopy | 2005

It was the hippocampus as no one had ever seen it, illuminated in radiant hues. The image is called, aptly, a Brainbow, the colors serving a scientific purpose by highlighting specific neural structures. Yet their choice also reflects an artistic bent; scientists display the brain not the way it is (an undifferentiated gray) but the way we want to see it, “painted” with bursts of fluorescent color.

This image, created in 2005, is one of many that Carl Schoon­over, a doctoral candidate in neurobiology and behavior at Columbia University, has collected in his recent Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams). As science has probed the brain’s structure and function, scientists have had to rely on art to translate their discoveries to visual form.

Another image from the article:

Human Cerebral Cortex | Alfonso Rodríguez-Baeza and Marisa Ortega-Sánchez

Scanning electron microscope | 2009

Proto via 3 Quarks Daily