ANDRZEJ KRAUZEMapping neural networks has come a long way since Santiago Ramón y Cajal, at the end of the 19th century, drew his remarkable diagrams of black, Golgi-stained neurons. It is easy to imagine Cajal’s delight in the beautifully colored and detailed images that routinely grace the covers of neuroscience journals these days, because he was both a scientist and a would-be artist, denied the latter career choice by his autocratic father.
In this month’s issue, which focuses on neuroscience, we pay homage to Cajal, with a cover painting of two pyramidal neurons done in enamel on gold by neuroscientist-turned-artist Greg Dunn. The work was commissioned by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. And Cajal’s own detailed drawing of a human cerebellar Purkinje cell illustrates the Foundations column on the issue’s last page. It was Cajal’s ability to visualize neuronal connections across a number of microscopic serial sections that was key to his hypothesis that individual nerve cells were separated by microscopic gaps and not part of a continuous mesh.
While the understanding of how neural connections work is improving by leaps and bounds, the sheer numbers of neurons in the ...
