“A slow mind may nurture more creative ideas The ability to show the quality of connections within the brain is leading to better understanding of creativity, intelligence and mental illness – and some spectacular pictures to boot.
Above, White Matter.
Having recruited a group of healthy twins from 20 to 30 years old, Paul Thompson of the University of California, Los Angeles, made these pictures of their brains’ white matter. This is largely composed of the fatty myelin sheaths around neurons and so reveals the brain’s connections. Thompson used diffusion imaging, which measures the direction in which water diffuses through white matter, to show the speed of the connections.
This is the white matter across a whole brain. In this picture, the colours don’t indicate connection speed – they merely allow the connections to be distinguished from each other. The bundle sticking out on the right are the optical tracts, leading to the eyes.”
(Image: David Shattuck, Arthur Toga, Paul Thompson/UCLA Lab of Neuro Imaging)
Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless (via mkandlez)
