Category Archives: Brain

For all your cerebral needs…

High Definition Brain Injuries

March 15th, 2012 | Brain

High-definition fiber-tracking map shows a million brain fibers in an uninjured brain.

High Definition Brain Injuries

Unfortunately, injuries to the brain can be incredibly difficult to diagnose and treat.  The nervous system is complex – there are 150,000-180,000 km of myelinated fibers in the brain alone!  However, new high-definition brain imaging (shown above) from a team of radiologists, pychiatrists, and neurosurgeons from the University of Pittsburgh will allow doctors to more easily diagnose and treat these illnesses.

Brain fibers from a patient hurt in an ATV accident – nerve fibers shown intact 

Here is an excerpt from Walter Schneider, a psychologist on the team that created the technology in a discussion with Discovery News:

Tracing brain damage is like trying to follow a truck on a highway from a helicopter and losing sight of it every time it encounters an intersection. But the new images can pick out the tracks and show how much function is lost after an injury.   

The images are captured using a magnetic resonance imager. By taking many scans and applying a new mathematical model, one can see the actual neural tracks. Ordinary MRI scans are taken from only 51 directions, but the new kind of scanning does it from four times that number. 

“This helps answer the question, how big of a hit did you take?” Schneider said. He likened it to an X-ray machine for bone injuries.

High Definition Brain Injuries – Uninjured shown in green, injured in yellow.

High definition Brain Injuries – Fiber tracking reveals injury in yellow, healthy fibers in green.

While the implications of this new technology are not completely clear, there is hope that it can eventually help diagnose and potentially treat a wide range of brain injuries — PTSD, concussion, brain tumors, and even autism.

The images themselves are pretty amazing even without the context.

-RSB

[via Discovery News & images from Walt Schneider Laboratory]

Wire Anatomy

March 11th, 2012 | Brain, Robot

Federico Carbajal is an architect from Montreal who created these anatomical pieces from galvanized wire, stainless steel and acrylic.

Federico’s description of his work:

An exploration into the boundaries of space: volume, surface and line; of the immaterial form and its perception – its structure and deconstruction. A deep look at the human body, its anatomy and the appropriation of its symbols.

With the influence of the old masters and the early works of Alexander Calder, to current digital 3D media and architectural representation, these tridimensional hybrids bring together drawing, architecture and sculpture in order to create a coherent spatial entity.
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Floating tridimensional sketches of the human body are drawn through space with different sheathes of galvanized wire mesh and are assembled and structured with architectural detail.
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Spatial sketching allows for the possibility of new representations of images in space, exploring the void and the dematerialization of volume.
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  The physical and metaphysical presence of the human body emanate through a combination of transparent planes and spatial lines.

I’m a fan of almost all interesting representations of human anatomy, and this work is no exception.  The wire heart is really great and surprisingly accurate.

Find more of his work here.

-RSB

[via Colossal]

Scientists and Their Drugs – Quiz!

March 8th, 2012 | Brain

I have figured out how to create a quiz for the site.  Try your hand at the first ever RobotSpaceBrain Quiz! It is rather hard, or at least it was for me, even after I created it.  If you can get half of them, I’m impressed.
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 As a note: of course these famous scientists may have experimented with many drugs; however, these are the drugs for which they are MOST famous.

The scientists include: Sigmund Freud, Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, Thomas Edison, Paul Erdos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John C.
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Lilly, Kerry Mullis, and Carl Sagan.

Have fun!  You can find the quiz here.

-RSB

Head & Neck Angiography – A Stereogram

February 19th, 2012 | Brain

How did I not know about this before!  This is amazing, but you have to have some patience!

A stereogram is a pair of two-dimensional panels depicting the view of a scene or an object from the vantage points of the right and left eyes.  Basically, if you can train your eyes to look at the images correctly, you can see in 3-dimensions without the need for 3d glasses.

In order to see in 3d, you must follow these instructions very carefully: http://www.2eyephotography.com/

Give it some patience, and you will be able to do it.  It’s kind of like Magic Eye.  The key is to make sure the middle image is the same size as the images on the sides, then just keep focusing back and forth between your pencil and that middle image until you can keep the middle image in focus.  Then voila!  You can see in 3d!

Try not to get frustrated, and take a break if you are getting a headache, but it will be awesome when you can see the depth.

-RSB

Coffee Brain

February 5th, 2012 | Brain

Our society certainly owes a lot to caffeine.  The National Coffee Association reports that around 54% of Americans drink coffee every single day, and another 25% drink coffee occasionally.  And when you add in other drinks that contain caffeine like soft drinks and tea, it’s estimated that over 90% of North Americans consume caffeine daily.  The drug performs its magic by acting as a central nervous stimulant, warding off drowsiness and restoring altertness.  Because caffeine is both water-soluble and lipid-soluble, it readily crosses the blood–brain barrier that separates the bloodstream from the interior of the brain.

Artist Michele Banks from Washington, D.C. wanted to pay tribute to this wonderful drug by creating the excellent coffee-inspired watercolors shown above.  She describes her process below:

I’ve never hidden the fact that much of my inspiration comes from caffeine. I added some to my explorations of the wonders of the human body and came up with Coffee-Stain Brain, an original watercolor painting, combining the beauty of the brain with the wonders of that most excellent elixir, coffee, without which not much progress would be made in either the arts or sciences…

I put down a background wash in a rich coffee brown shade, and then “painted” on it with a paper coffee cup dipped in paint in a dark, espresso brown. The paint spreads out a little, creating that coffee-ring-on-paper pattern familiar to many of us from studying or working late. The background is a rich, creamy, cafe au lait shade.

I really enjoy how she implemented the idea of the coffee stain into the watercolors.  It almost feels as if the works were created by accident late in the night as she worked on other projects.

You can find more coffee brains and other science-inspired watercolors for sale from her website here.  They would make a great addition to the lab.

-RSB

 

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