ANDRZEJ KRAUZEIt’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the human brain. With its 86 billion neurons, even greater numbers of glial cells, a quadrillion synapses, and millions of miles of axons, this intricate organ doesn’t readily reveal its inner workings. But its complexity hasn’t kept researchers from striving to sort out the details of the brain’s form and functions.
Fascination with the brain is age-old. Gross anatomical dissections, starting in about 280 BCE in Alexandria and (after more than a thousand years of prohibition) resuming in the Renaissance, segued into microscopic examination. Over the centuries, structural drawings by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal have morphed into diagrams of the connectome and super-resolution images and videos of neurons in action. Continuous development of new techniques now allows neuroscientists to probe ever deeper into how the brain works.
During the long history of neurobiology, dogmatic beliefs about the brain have arisen, only to be toppled by new findings. In our annual issue dedicated to neuroscience, two features describe such dogma-busting research. Neuroscientist Margaret McCarthy debunks the idea that male and female brains differ only ...
