(c) Lee lab
Wei Chung Allen Lee of the Harvard Medical School research team that are looking at mapping the body's neurological systems has this to say, “The brain is structured so that each neuron is connected to thousands of other neurons, and so to understand what a single neuron is doing, ideally you study it within the context of the rest of the neural network. In essence, the structure of how our neurons are wired is our “self,” and connectomics is the key to understanding this structure." My lab is interested in... how those neurons are active within the functioning circuit. We do this in the context of behaviour, ranging from making decisions to executing actions."
However it is the fruit fly that is providing the material for the research and initially what we are looking at is a map of drosophila.
The fruit fly: Drosophila
As an animist, I wondered what it must be like to be immersed into the fruit fly's umwelten or subjective reality. The project had revealed that complex behaviours and motor control were driven largely by distributed local neural circuits throughout the body rather than a single top-down brain command centre. I began to wonder how similar we might be to a fruit fly, how many of our own behaviours were the result of distributed local circuits.
As a result of all this work the first complete synapse-level wiring diagram of the entire adult fruit fly central nervous system, uniting brain and nerve cord connectomes has been published and the images are wonderful.
The Male CNS dataset covers the fruit fly’s brain and ventral nerve cord.
As I read about these things I was reminded of my time in Gothenburg, where I became very aware of how monkeys were used in the development of new spinal injury treatments. At the time I wrote about how Bruno Latour used the image of a constant fermentation that arises as a physical/chemical/quantum/emotional/psychological and economic mix, all being part of the currents that flow within vast energy seas of interconnected information, but the bit we think we swim in tends to be experienced as being very shallow and we easily forget its depths. Therefore we need to be reminded that amongst many other things, we are beholden to dead animals, who have given their lives for our research. As a child in the 1950s the short prayer we had to say before meals, whereby we thanked God for there being enough food to eat went,
may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”
That small moment, whereby as a child I had to think about where the food came from was important. It would seem to me that we need something similar as a recognition of the role of other creatures in providing us with information that helps us to think about how we are ourselves constructed. The images below are provided curtesy of a mouse and we can think of them as visual prayers or simply that they look magical.
3D images of two neuron types in the mouse cerebellum. (c) Lee lab
An image of two granule cells (light and dark blue) connected to three mossy fibers (red, pink, and yellow) in the mouse cerebellum.
As a small token of appreciation, I have written a short poem; like the one about being grateful for the food we have, it is targeted at children, my 1950s brain, still wired in a particular child focused way and yet at the same time I'm mindful that magic practices often require a rhyming spell in order to make them effective. Even Sooty had to chant, "Izzy wizzy, let's get busy!" before his spells would work, all of which is part of the life soup, or witches brew, that consists of the physical/chemical/quantum/emotional/psychological and economic mix that Bruno Latour was thinking about.
Of tiger, monkey, fish and fly.
Please listen to my humble prayer.
My endless, heavy debt of care.
For creatures of the land and sea.
Who've given up their lives for me.
So how does this mapping of body's neurological systems relate to what I'm doing as a creator of imagined interiors of the body? Studies have shown that within an area of the brain known as the somatosensory cortex there exists a map of the body, with different regions corresponding to different body parts. These maps are responsible for processing sensory information, such as touch, temperate and pain, as well as body position. For example, if you touch something hot with your hand, this will activate a particular region of the brain; if you stub your toe, a different region activates. For decades now, the commonly-accepted view among neuroscientists has been that following amputation of a limb, neighbouring regions rearrange and essentially take over the area previously assigned to the now missing limb. But this has presented a conundrum. Most amputees report phantom sensations, a feeling that the limb is still in place, this can also lead to sensations such as itching or pain in the missing limb. Also, brain imaging studies where amputees have been asked to ‘move’ their missing fingers have shown brain patterns resembling those of able-bodied individuals. I.e. the body itself has an imagined map, one that remains in place, even if parts of the body are no longer there. In my own imagination therefore, the imagined body map I internally possess myself, becomes merged with the imagined body that I am over the years constructing and externalising, not only of my own interoceptual feelings, but of other people's.
Pain map made in response to a conversation
Sclerotome pain referral patterns
Diagram from a Hermetic practice
The more I talk to people about their pain, the more I realise it is a complex issue. For instance, sclerotomal pain is typically felt as something deep down or dull and it is poorly localised; people often describe it as “achy” or “boring”. In contrast: dermatomal pain, that connected to an area of the skin linked to sensory neurons from a particular spinal nerve, can be sharp and burning and well defined, as when a spinal nerve root is compressed, irritated, or inflamed (such as from a herniated disc, spinal stenosis, or a viral infection like shingles). This is closely linked to myotomal pain, as felt by a group of skeletal muscles supplied by a single spinal nerve root; the pain symptoms occurring when a nerve root in the spine is compressed, irritated, or injured. This time a pain might feel crampy and be associated with restricted movement or fatigue. There also exist maps of acupuncture points that treat deep connective tissue pain as well as sclerotomal maps that assist clinicians in tracing the origin of pain that doesn’t follow a typical dermatome or myotome, such as pain around the shoulder blade from lower cervical irritation or deep pelvic pain from sacral sclerotome involvement. I. e. where pain seems to be in the mind map, is not necessarily, where an actual problem lies in the body. It is as if the body can tell lies or at least stories that are hard to read or understand. These issues chiming with my own continuing struggle to visualise the sensations I have when inhabiting this old body of mine. These other maps all operating as parallel forms of awareness, that lie in that area of associated attempts to visualise the internal body from the point of view of other disciplines. My imagined interoceptual maps acknowledge their existence and participate in diagrammatic dialogues with the observer but the area of overlap is one of intuitive feeling and never one of scientific verisimilitude, as much about diagrams taken from magic rituals as maps of Yorkshire's underlying geology.
Interoceptual body map
Ref.
Caruso, C (2023) A New Field of Neuroscience Aims to Map Connections in the Brain: Scientists working in connectomics are creating comprehensive maps of how neurons connect to one another Harvard Medical School Reseach News January 19, Accessed from https://hms.harvard.edu/news/new-field-neuroscience-aims-map-connections-brain 17 Oct 26. Schone, HR et al. Stable Cortical Body Maps Before and After Arm Amputation. Nature Neuroscience; 21 Aug 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02037-7
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