In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg Dunn was moonlighting with a different kind of experiment: blowing ink across pieces of paper. The neuron-like pattern it formed was instantly recognizable to him as a neuroscientist. “Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that’s probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow,” he says. “The reason the technique works really well is because it’s directly related to how neurons are actually behaving.”
Dunn calls this the “fractal solution to the universe,” which he sees as the “fundamental beauty of nature.” He’s fascinated that this branching pattern holds true across orders of magnitude, whether that’s nanometers for neurons, centimeters for ink, or meters for a tree branch.
Since graduating with his PhD last fall, Dunn has continued to spend his days with neurons—big, golden ones ten thousand times the size of neurons in your brain. The former University of Pennsylvania grad student now creates paintings of neurons for a living.
When I was 5, my favorite show was Mighty Mouse. I loved it. I dressed as Mighty Mouse for Halloween, brushed my teeth with a Mighty Mouse electric toothbrush, wore Mighty Mouse Underoos, and watched the cartoon religiously. It was on channel 56 at 2:30 every weekday. And every weekday, after…
