Drawings of nervous systems

Part of a vertical-transverse section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major. 

I have recently discovered Camillo Golgi's Drawings of nervous systems. They are both beautiful and sublime. Golgi was faced with a difficult problem, how could he begin to see the cell structure within nervous tissue, as these cells were so tightly packed that if you tried to stain them in order to see them, you simply produced an un-analysable blob. No structural detail or lines of interconnection could be picked out. The axon and dendrites of neurons, the thin filamentary extensions of neural cells, were too thin to take up the stains that had been used in the past. However Golgi's method was to use a substance that would only stain a limited number of random cells. Using his method, dendrites, as well as the cell soma, are clearly stained for their entire length, which allowed him to visualise the complex networking structures of many parts of the brain. Interestingly it is silver nitrate, the key ingredient in early photography, that is central to this discovery. Because only random neurons were stained, it was much easier to see them, and then Golgi could speculate how they would collectively come together to determine their total structure. This reminded me of one of my first drawing classes at college on Wolverhampton, we were told to look at the situation with squinted eyes, and shown that in cutting down on the amount of light coming through to us, it was easier to see what we were looking at as details were eliminated.

Pes Hippocampi major

Part of a vertical section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major

In reality there would not be as much space around each nerve, but by giving each one its own space, a very convincing series of images were produced, images that allow us to 'see' what is going on, in our minds.

If you pull away from this microscopic view of the nervous system, as in the video 'Powers of ten', you begin to see the brain itself as an organ. Golgi's sections are located in specific areas of the body's brain landscape, just as a stand of trees might be located in a map of Yorkshire, that is itself to be found within a map of England. 

Inferior and posterior cornua, viewed from above. (Pes. hipp. labeled at center top.)

From Grey's Anatomy 

As the body organs are isolated from their position within a body, it is as if they become creatures in their own right, the poetic inhabitants of an ecosystem, that have at some point been captured and stuffed for scientific examination.

Corpus callosum

The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibres that connects the brain's left and right hemispheres. It allows the two sides of the brain to communicate and coordinate signals. The 'O' on the drawing above indicates where the pes hippocampi lies; a location that when I saw it in the illustration above, made me think of a type of lure, its position within the drawing reminding me of the thaumatichthys, the trapjaw anglerfish, that has a bioluminescent lure located inside its mouth. This 'wonder fish' lives in the deepest parts of our oceans, inhabiting a dark so far away from the surface that if any creature was to signify the inhabitants of our deep subconscious, this would be it. 

Illustration from the Ocean World

As we move in and out of the body, it is as if we are moving through a landscape with strange inhabitants. The organs and microscopic fibres illustrated above, are as much a product of an artist's imagination as they are a materialisation of a set of embodied functions and could, if we are not trained as medics, be anything and without labels, for myself they become 'free floating signifiers', things that suggest organic form, but whose functions I can only guess at; however  their poetic function is what I'm more interested in, together with their possibilities for imaginative invention. 

Please forgive my rambling mind, it is I know trying to get me somewhere, but as is often the case by a strange route. So do try to follow me as I attempt to make my next connection. In his paper on the biological bases out of which shamanism evolved, Winkelman (2004) argues that shamanism was the original neurotheology. Because, he argued, shamanism manifested itself all across the world, in many cultures and times, many of which could never have known each other; it was most likely that shamanic type thinking, has a biological foundation. He goes on to state that the brain has within it neurognostic structures, (the initial, inherited organisation of neural models from which more developed models grow) based on neural networks that shape basic forms of perception and that these structures also involve innate processing and representation modules that may underlie the reasons why we developed religion. He then goes on to state that animism uses innate representation modules that are deeply involved in how we understand our ideas of self and others, concluding with an idea that there is such as thing as a “natural history intelligence,” that uses an innate capacity 'for representing animal species to form metaphoric personal and social identities based in animals', (p. 210). But now we get to the nub of what I was interested in. After arguing that our bodies provide a neurological basis for human experience and knowing, he cites Newton 1996 and Friedrich 1991 in developing an idea that metaphors and analogic thinking, such as soul flight involve body image, therefore our symbol systems are derived from neurognostic models for organising both internal and external experiences (Citing Laughlin 1997). Sociocultural influences are still powerful shapers but he argues, 'universal body-based representational capacities combine memory, perception, affect, and cognition in an image-based symbolic information system'. (Winkelman 2004 p. 200)

Winkelman's paper made me think again about how my interests were perhaps more joined up that I had previously believed. I had been thinking of some sort of visual poetry, that could be developed that might link up my interests in animism and interoceptual representation. In particular sometimes shamans, such as those who operated within indigenous cultures of North America, used buffalo robes as part of their transformational rituals. Clothing yourself in the skin of another, being an excellent way to channel the other creature's spirit into yourself.

Shaman's buffalo robe

A body suit/ drawing made to explore the idea of an interoceptual self-portrait

In the image above, when it is activated by my presence, my head is positioned to peer through from the other side of the drawing, replacing the existing cardboard surrogate head, (top right). I stand where the two shoes are. Once I am in place, I deliver a monologue about the relationship between my emotional state and how I think about my body. Within the body suit/drawing are inserts and they are my responses to Camillo Golgi's drawings. I have no access to microscopes or other similar technology, so have to work with visual analogies instead. If you wet an area of paper with clear water and then dip an ink loaded brush into it to draw, you will immediately see a fine network of watery threads spread out from your drawn lines. These have become for myself part of my drawing's nervous system, visually operating like organs and as a conjoined nervous system at the same time. 

An 'organ' detail from the drawing above

I'm working with two other artists on this aspect of my research and they will draw from the situation I set up in my studio, which will be made up of three or four situations similar to the one above. They will respond to what I have been doing, just as I will respond to what they have done, by making drawings. The drawings will operate as a form of communication between artists who are operating for at least a little while as shamans, whereby we see what can be passed on and what can be reinvented, in relation to the specific issues on the ground where each artist lives.

As Manvir Singh states in his book, 'Shamanism, The timeless religion', "We are all endowed with the same cognitive architecture,", (2025, p. 12), his argument being that shamanic practices reflect the way we are wired to think and that they reoccur in different guises over and over again throughout human history. The other day I was making coiled snail type creatures, based on an object I saw in a museum in Malta. They are designed to operate as votives for gardeners suffering an influx of slugs. We all need to believe that there is some way of making our wishes come true, one of these being that if only the slugs would go away, my garden would prosper. I tap into that wish and as I do I would like to think that I hold onto an invisible link that goes back thousands of years to those first artists who made images to intercede between the known and the unknown, a history that includes Camillo Golgi, as much as it does the "Sorcerer" from the cave of Les Trois-Frères.

Slug votive

References

Singh, M., (2018) Why is there shamanism? Developing the cultural evolutionary theory and addressing alternative accounts. Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 2018;41:e92. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002230

Singh, M. (2025) Shamanism: The Timeless Religion London: Alan Lane

Winkelman, M., (2004) “Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology”, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 39(1), 193–217. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2004.00566.x

See also:

The macro and the micro (Includes a link to the video 'Powers of ten')

Drawing feet

Drawing together science and myth

Paper and skin

What can art do?