Short Wave - Arts Week: The Life Cycle Of A Neuron

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

An exhibit that blended science and technology for an immersive art experience went on display in Washington, DC and New York City in 2021 and 2022. It invited visitors to explore the cells in their brain. The installation was a partnership between the Society for Neuroscience and technology-based art space, ARTECHOUSE. In this encore episode, producer Thomas Lu talks to neuroscientist John Morrison and chief creative officer Sandro Kereselidze about the Life of a Neuron.Curious about other ways science intersects with art? Email us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Have you heard the one where a reporter, producer, and editor walk into an art exhibit? Well, you'll just have to wait and see what happens. Producer Thomas Liu brought us this story a year ago about the life and death of a neuron through sound and light. And we're revisiting this immersive experience in honor of Shortwave Art Week. So slap on a pair of headphones and enjoy the show. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. A few weeks ago, my editor and I ventured down three stories below, ground into the basement of an unassuming building in Washington, D.C. We're heading to a new exhibit

housed at the technology-based art space, Arctech House. So what we're looking at here is our main space gallery. That's ArtTech House DC sales manager, Josh Feldman. He's our guide for this visit. As we step foot through the installation, you are stepping foot into our brain. Quite literally, we are walking into a projection of the human brain. The main gallery space is illuminated by high-definition laser projectors from the floor to the wall. And as we roam the room, our bodies become an extension of the floor, another surface for the projections to shine on. The focus of this exhibit is the brain.

More specifically, the nerve cells in our brains. We wanted to tell the story of a neuron, a single neuron, in order to educate the public regarding the fact that the neuron is the essential element of the brain. That's John Morrison, professor of neurology at the University of California Davis. and the lead neuroscientists for this new exhibit. He tells me that everything we do is the result of about 86 billion neurons talking to one another, from our senses, touch, smell, sight, taste, and hearing

to how we interpret and understand our world. The neuron, it's a cell that's specialized for communication. All the circuits within the brain that process information are formed by neurons. Today on the show, the life of a neuron. Plus, how the melding of research with art and technology pushes the boundaries of how we learn about the world

and understand ourselves. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. The idea for this exhibit started a couple years ago when neuroscientist John Morrison had a concept in mind. We decided to construct a three-dimensional neuron that you could experience, that you could walk through. But we didn't have a way to do it.

We just knew we wanted to do it. He knew it was a stretch. an immersive way to visualize the neuron, but then he and his colleagues at the Society for Neuroscience met some of the artists from Artak House. This meeting eventually led to a multi-year collaboration. And everybody had to listen to me at the beginning of each call, say, look, I think we got about a 50% chance of this working.

And then by the end of the call, I'd say, okay, we're down to 20% because it was just so, it just seemed so difficult all the way through. The challenge here was figuring out how to provide enough data in scientific images for the artist to accurately work from. But in the end, it paid off. Can you walk us through what happens in the first nine months of human development from the science perspective? Do you have a couple hours? I mean, if you have a couple of hours, I have a couple of hours.

No, no, I'm just kidding. The main thing that happens is that you start with... with very few cells. They can replicate at that point. In other words, just like a cell in your skin, they can replicate. You can get more and more cells. But they're not neurons yet.

And then they start to differentiate into neurons. Now, at the same time, those neurons are starting to specialize in terms of where they are in the brain. So now in those first nine months, you're already developing areas that will respond to vision, that will produce movement,

that will end up being, what we refer to as the thinking regions of the brain. That's already starting in those first nine months. Right. And you go from literally relatively few neurons or few cells to billions of neurons. And they're already neurons. They're already specialized. They're already forming circuits.

Not the adult circuits. You're going to do a tremendous amount of sculpting of those circuits and modification of those neurons after birth. At this early stage in a neuron's development, in the exhibit, the walls, floors, and your body are covered in spheres of white dots swarming and stretching and growing as they swim towards the center wall. You start to see a larger sphere take shape, and just as quickly as it forms, you start to see sparks of color flying by just for a moment, and once again, you are surrounded. Visualizing all this, that was a bigger challenge, right?

To really, how can we tell how this story it falls? why we kind of called it the life of a neuron, because it's a universal story of us. And we're learning as, you know, every second. And that shows on the visually as well, too, to that beauty of the color and the structure of the neurons itself. This is Sandra Gerizl Litsa, the founder and chief creative officer of Arctic House. In addition to the visuals, he says sound is also key to the immersive experience, which, by the way, what you've been hearing and will hear for the rest of the episode,

is the soundtrack, the audio, from the exhibit. With this installation, we really try to push the sound effects and sound landscape in the sense that to tell that story throughout the whole 20 minutes duration where it begins with the baby crying or playing and the playground and continues to the high school. And these sounds are really universal. That's interesting that you mentioned,

mention the universality of the sounds, because the sound is very prominent in the exhibit. But at the same time, it feels universal yet very familiar, right? Because it's sounds of babies crying. It sounds of laughter. It sounds of people singing happy birthday. Correct. What informed kind of the pairing of those sounds with the visuals? Well, to me, and if I go all the way to the back to where my roots are coming from

and growing up in a family of artists, and especially my dad made 65 movies, and he described me many times that the most important part of the film is the music and the soundtrack. And it was fascinating learning how the sound tremendously affects our experience and our brain and hearing that. And it was very much inspiration to take it to the next level. Right, right.

So I guess, John, when I experienced, it, I saw the dots morphing into the neurons and then the colors getting more vibrant from pastels. And then I interpreted something kind of like a jungle, maybe roots of some sort, and also maybe perhaps electricity traveling from neuron to neuron. But at the same time, that's my interpretation of it. How do you see it as a neuroscientist? Like, what does that say about our developing brain? Well, I think your perceptions were exactly what we're, we were trying to evoke, and I think that it's accurate, that that infant brain is super active. And what I thought they did extraordinarily well was they, through the sound and the visualization,

they had spines coming and going, and they had the dendrites reaching out, and they had, as you said, circuitry on top of the structure. But what they really evoked for me, and I think for any neurobiologists, that saw the exhibit is that extraordinary level of activity and plasticity at that age. And when they move to an older age, everything is more stable, except for adolescence. They really had fun with adolescence in exactly the way that it should evoked a transition from the superplastic brain to the stable brain. Now, of course, plasticity continues throughout your life.

It isn't that it goes away. It's just that it's a little bit decreased. Right. But the adolescent brain, to me, evoked a lot of, oh my gosh, I guess confusion. There was so much activity and the colors were moving so fast. And the electrical circuits that they superimposed on the neurons were so... There was a sense of movement. Yes.

There's so much movement inside the neuron. Mitochondriar flying around, proteins flying around. the structure even changing. And they managed to evoke that. Right. Right. Sandro, how did you evoke that from the sketches and the 3D models

that John sent to you? I think it's really working with the incredible artists and talents to really give them right information, right tools. And I think that's what's beautiful with this exhibit that artists, you know, respectfully use this information to create this beautiful story, right?

Right. And we didn't only provide this three-dimensional neuron. We also were constantly providing neurobiology 101. And the artists involved actually learned a lot of neuroscience. When I met the artists, I was really struck by that. One of the artists that worked on the project is now thinking of getting a PhD in neuroscience. Oh, wow. And that was also something that struck me.

me is that the exhibit itself is about, what, 20 minutes? The first half to maybe the first 75% of it, it felt very artistic. It felt very abstract and it felt very impressionistic, right? The colors are changing. It's growing. But then when we reach the death part, you start hearing things like crying and ambulance and even literally slowing down of the visual elements. you're also visually seeing what I'm interpreting as the neuron dying. John, was that accurately portrayed in the representative parts of the projection? Oh, my God. So the first time I saw it, I didn't know what I was going to see.

I had no idea. I'm watching it. And then I'm looking at the wall and I see the neuron start to break up and die and the dendrites falling off. And then it's kind of retracting. And that's exactly what I see in the microscope. Because we study aging in Alzheimer's disease. And I think what they did either purposely or by accident is when they moved from those earlier life stages to adult and then death,

they got very literal. They were much closer to what you would actually see in a microscope. Oh, my God, that's a neuron dying. Wow. Yeah. I mean, my editor who's also listening in, she was telling me that seeing those moments, she was also getting a bit emotional.

And I think that just speaks to the artistic side of incorporating the science. Sandra, what was your experience first exhibiting this? You know, like, to be honest with you, I think it's something definitely, it's a experience that we all go into, I think what we were aiming with this universal story is to really tell the beauty of the things that are happening inside of us and who we are. And I think it's something that makes you pause for a moment and think about your life and think about how the life is just a moment. It's just a really short moment that we're all living through and going through the same things inside of us.

It's absolutely the same things happening in every one of us. John and Sandra hope that people leave this exhibit with a better understanding of the brain and themselves. And at its core, this exhibit combines decades of research from neuroscience and the advancement of both artistic and scientific technologies. As the tools we use to teach and visualize our understanding of ourselves change, they are excited for what's to come. This episode was reported and produced by me, Thomas Liu,

edited by Giselle Grayson and fact-checked by Margaret Serrino. The audio engineer for this episode was Gilly Moon. Special thanks to science correspondent John Hamilton and the publicist working with Arctic House, Jacobin Norwood. Thanks so much for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.