EveryDay Matters July 7, axons and dendrites

One of my perennial interests is the functioning and research into the workings of the human brain, for various reasons too long to go into here, and my latest reading, Connectome by Sebastian Seung, is a great journey into new findings on the connectivity within the brain, and its plasticity.  He has a great background in the history of brain research, too, as well as other sciences.

So, since I love images of bacteria, viruses, microscopic elements of the brain, I just had to make an ink drawing of this, pilot pen on Arches hotpress,

reproduced in his book: Cross Sections of Axons and Dendrites imaged by an electron microscope.  To know what these actually are, you need to read his book, unless you're already a biologist all versed in them.

Over the years, I've done a number of drawings, and carvings for stamps, from biological phenomena.  One of my favorite is a stamp I carved, all sinuous and interlocking lines and curves, which people are hugely amused to find is in fact a representation of the internal architecture of a deer's nose!  some of them are from textbooks where the electron microscope was the only way to get the image, some are the opposite, such as the stamps I made, drawing directly onto the block, from photos taken from space of the Mississippi Delta.

What they all have in common is that amazing complexity and balance at the same time.