29 March – 17 June 2012

Wellcome Trust, 183 Euston Road, London. NW1.

My first love is cognitive neuroscience. It was with enormous pleasure that I went to look around the ‘Brains: The Mind as Matter’ exhibition at the Wellcome Trust this afternoon on my own. The Wellcome Trust in fact funded my Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1997 – 2000 on the early detection of frontal lobe dementia, after I obtained the second highest mark on the class list in neuroscience at Cambridge in finals in 1996.

For me the Wellcome Trust is very easy to get to from Primrose Hill. Its opening hours are here. I had a very relaxing   dish of wild rice accompanied by traditional lemonade at the café run by Peyton and Byrne.

I found the staff in the Blackwells bookshop very helpful as I managed to locate ‘Zero degrees of empathy’, indeed hand-signed by Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, my first ever supervisor at Cambridge, a world expert on autism and Asperger spectrum disorders and theory of mind, amongst various other neuroscientific topics such as synaesthesia. Some other classics of mine were to be found in that bookshop, including the seminal ‘Advice for a young investigator’ by Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

I asked Steve, one of the exhibition helpers, how many neurones he thought the human brain had. As a philosophy graduate, his estimate of 100 billion was pretty impressive – the figure is apparently 1000 million. We then discussed why the human brain should have quite so many neurones, when so many of the functions of the brain were done by animals such as their fly in more primitive organs (such as the eye). We discussed how the answer was probably was to do with humans perceive the mental states of others, and how humans are able to integrate information from the senses with planning , strategy, personality and emotions in a coherent manner. I feel that Simon would have been proud of Steve’s answer. I feel Simon also would have been particularly proud of the fact that Steve admired the contribution which Simon had made in putting raising the awareness of autism and Asperger spectrum disorders. Our conversation, given Steve’s background, necessarily came onto the philosophy of mind, as we discussed how our conceptualisation of the mind or brain had changed with time. How the relative importance of information from the body’s organs had been perceived differently with the progress of time, and indeed whether ‘modularity of mind’ existed (as reflected in the historic rise of phrenology) or whether the notion of distributed neuronal networks was a more realistic approach. Whatever functional architecture one decides upon for the human brain, possibly the greatest achievement of contemporary neuroscience has been to realise that the social brain is necessary for communities to function, and if, how or why we have a social brain designed differently from other animals present tough challenges for us as a society.

The exhibition itself was beautiful. The photographs of the brain donors were beautifully presented. The 3-D etching of a brain onto a glass block ‘My soul’ by Katharine Dawson, was simply magnificent. This consists of a laser-etched lead crystal glass formation in the shape of a brain, and was created using the artist’s own MRI scan.

I particularly enjoyed the functional neuroimaging of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in live time – though listening to the music itself with headphones while watching the different colours of the brain activations was rather mesmerising! I particularly liked the efforts the curators had made in reflecting the comparative anatomy of the brain across species,  e.g. brain models of species ranging from alligator to dog, though perhaps the neuroscientific advisors of the exhibition failed to point out perhaps that ‘size isn’t everything’ when it comes to the power of the brain (that’s why all the elegance in measuring the size of parts of the brain might be misplaced given the inevitable amount of neuronal redundancy there might be).

Above all, the exhibition succeeded in making the viewer question what he or she thought about this most enigmatic of all organs, and I felt it was quite fitting that we were left with an air of confusion epitomised by this cinema poster ‘Change of Mind’ featuring Leslie Nielsen.

But that of course would not be the first time that output from the Wellcome Trust had turned your perception of our living world upside down..!