EXQUISITE PRESCIENT AESTHETICS

The beginning of science is art.

The beginning of art is seeing.

The beginning of seeing is looking.

When we look, what do we really see? This is the question that emerges out of my study of the life and work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), a Spanish neural investigator and pathologist who focused his attention on the histology of the central nervous system. Learning about him raised many questions about the possibilities of a life's work and, especially about Cajal's life and the distinction made between art and science. I think what I discovered is that, for him and maybe for all of us, we need to particularize before we unify our thinking about anything. We seem to need details in order to see the whole. We can't deduce or synthesize or conclude without knowing the particulars. Ironically, the whole can't be seen until all the pieces (or as many as possible) can be brought into the picture. When we do that we can be surprised by what coalesces. Because most investigations are vast in their scope, our impression of the whole is ultimately only partial and temporary until more information is obtained or more experiments are performed. This is as true in science as in art.

What did Cajal notice? Cajal's father was a professor of anatomy and Santiago followed in his footsteps through medical school and into a professorship of anatomy, even though his early interests were in art and photography. In science his interests were focused on the study of histology (study of cells in tissues) of inflammation and basic cellular structures. He was aided in his studies by the available technology of the light microscope and a technique for staining cells in microscopic slide preparations, a method developed by the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi. These technologies allowed him to explore the histology of the central nervous system, a lifetime study that earned him and Golgi a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. It is important to Cajal's life story to outline the way in which he devoted his time and energy but, of course, that is only the beginning of what his life's work signifies. There are many threads and themes in his life that one could pull on to see the whole of it better. It is his studies of neuroanatomy that are of primary interest, even though one could also write about his family life or his own writings (his autobiography, Recollections of a Life, is considered to be one of the finest scientific autobiographies), among many other threads in a life of multiple interests and accomplishments.

What is striking to me about his work in histology is the beauty of the drawings he did of the cells he studied under the microscope. It is interesting to me that he was also interested in the early techniques of photography (he wrote a book on the technology and art of color photography and many of the portraits of him are self-portraits, the very first “selfies,” I suppose) and one can see in his drawings some of the stop-action motion that characterized the early experiments in photography. This reminds me of how Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), too, was fascinated with photography and especially the work of Edweard Muybridge and his photographic motion studies. The lives of Cajal and Eakins overlapped in time and in other ways, too. Eakins was devoted to the idea that the study of gross anatomy enabled the artist to shape the surface anatomy of the human body in ways that conformed to the truth of its functions. Cajal also discovered much about the functioning of the human brain from its anatomical structures, only from the microscopic perspective. Each was an artist in his own right and each began with the particularities of anatomy. The beginning of science is art. The beginning of art is science. When we make too many categories and distinctions, we lose sight of the fact that the goal is to understand the entirety as a marvelous construction. Science and art are wedded in reality and we lose much if we feel a need to pick one or the other when we want to know about the structures of body, brain, and mind.

The drawings Cajal made of the human central nervous system are intimate observations of structures that often show all the marks of progressive understanding. There are in some of his drawings the preliminary pencil lines that resemble ancient palimpsests. There are heavy lines and darker colors to designate primary foci of investigation. There are ghostly structures to indicate the tangle of background fibers and tracts. We are asked to notice his lettering and numbers that put some order into the layers of brain tissue to show locations and proximities. He has also highlighted specific areas by painting in contrasting white washes around structures and these are an artist's working marks. Some cells are exaggerated in size to call attention to their importance in the drawing. His working methods often meant that he would spend mornings peering into his microscope and then drawing from memory in the afternoons. He estimated that he had done 20,000 drawings but only about 2,500 survive. One can only imagine how prodigious his work methods were to produce so many individual studies.

His drawings were more than descriptive and artfully beautiful. They were also maps of brain function. We don't stop to think how important the little arrows are in understanding a map. They designate location as well as direction. One can see their importance to Cajal's thinking and his formulations of brain function by noticing how he used them. They relate to his ability to bring motion, the motion of photography perhaps, into a two-dimensional rendering of brain cellular structure, an otherwise static image. The deductions he made of nerve function were prescient and many were corroborated and supported only decades later when more sophisticated technologies for studying cellular structures were developed. The beginning of science is art. Cajal's autobiography is divided into two sections, one focused on his science and the other on his art. Yet, his life was an example of how it is possible to unite the two divisions. We take things apart in order to put them back together into some cohesive and comprehensive whole. When we do gather the pieces we often find new combinations and new meanings. When taken as a whole, what we observe is something with artful properties. It isn't until we begin to dissect the parts, either with microscopes or unaided eyes, that we discover the miraculous interweavings and interdependence. Cajal's drawings were ideas about central nervous system function, a very complex aspect of human anatomy and as yet unyielding in the secrets of how brain becomes mind.

Cajal developed an approach to the study of neural function he called the Neuron Theory. This was a description of neuroanatomy in which nerve cells were contiguous and not continuous in structure (the Reticular Theory), as championed by Camillo Golgi. Additionally, the Neuron Theory contained Cajal's Theory of Dynamic Polarization where chemical signals (now referred to as system information) flowed in only one direction along the nerve fibers, the directions designated by the arrows drawn on the maps of anatomical structures. The interruptions in nerve structure allowed for transmission of nerve signals by way of chemicals that crossed the small spaces between nerve bodies. This was not confirmed until the 1950s with electron microscopy. Many other theories proposed by Cajal were also confirmed many decades after his work was first published, all based on what his eye could see through his microscope. He was looking and also seeing, a prerequisite for discovery.

Prescience is far removed from guesswork. Cajal's foresight was based on endless hours hovering over a microscope and drawing what he could see. He brought to his scientific work an artist's eye and sensibility. What he recorded demonstrated that what he saw was structure and pattern and he translated these into elements of form, specificity, interdependence, complexity yielding to simplification, and information transmission—all precursors to intelligence and the evolution of mind. We are still far removed from the correlations that link our brains to our minds even in the most simplistic ways. Modern neuroscience has made strides in making connections between brain function and thought and behavior patterns but there is still no accounting for what makes me different in my thoughts from you. We know that all we are, how we act and interact, is confined to the processing in our brains but we don't have many clues as to how identities are formed and shaped in that marvelous machine, a machine that never sleeps the way we think sleep occurs. We don't know all the details about brain function in its normal state and less about abnormal brain function, about how it heals and about synaptic plasticity. Does the brain create the mind? Is learning a function of brain or mind? Where in the brain do we harbor our spiritual selves? How do we get the sense that our ideas are evolving and that we are growing in awareness and wisdom?

Today's Connectome Project is designed to map all of the brain's neuronal connections. Will that help us understand the answers to some of the questions asked above? If the neurons aren't connected in an interwoven reticular pattern and brain function is dependent on chemical transmission in one direction only along individual cells and if normal function recruits neurons from all over the brain, then do we think we will be able to know how the brain generates and supports the mind? In thinking even this, how will we track all the millions of connections and sparkings that help us think it?

I find it interesting that Cajal and Golgi championed diametrically opposite theories of nerve structure and function but shared a Nobel Prize for their work. We don't see this same open-ended acceptance of the idea that even in science (maybe especially in science) there are partial truths to be discovered and that science is more like art in being malleable, improvised, and creative in format but never fabricated. And it is also true that science is as often wrong as confirmatory in its results. But don't we learn as much and perhaps more by what science can't confirm as by how the results confirm the hypotheses? Don't we approach art in the same way? Isn't every piece of art an experiment? Don't both scientists and artists use the same neural structures in the brain, perhaps borrowing fibers and bundles from one another and recruiting for different purposes?

Cajal was honored in his own lifetime and not only by being awarded a Nobel Prize. One of the cells he first described and drew was named the “interstitial cell of Cajal.” It is a specific neuron within the smooth muscle of the gut that is a generator and pacemaker for the slow waves of gut contraction that mediates between motor neurons and the smooth muscle cells, allowing for the all-important movement of waste along the GI tract. In a gesture that honors Cajal's devotion to life viewed through the microscope and into the cosmos, Asteroid 117413 was named Ramonycajal in his honor. So, in the gut of us human animals or in the heart of the cosmos, Santiago Ramon y Cajal is truly honored as a man for all times. His life and work were art forms in the service of science and a greater understanding of the brain and mind.