chapter—29:

Jar of things to remember, not things like pay the electric bill or do the laundry but rather things like smile at a stranger, go for a walk, remember how lovely you are, or funny things you or your friends say. A jar full of things that remind you to love who you are and how you live and what you want and who you become.

(Source: frozen--strawberriess)

neurolove:

PET images of Alzheimer’s brain

PET (positron emission tomography; said like “pet”- the animals you have at home) is a type of imaging that relies on a radioactive ligand (injected into the patient) to give off a signal for a particular type of chemical.  For instance, if you want to look at a specific receptor or neurotransmitter, you could put in a competitive radioactive ligand that would bind to that receptor and it would tell you where that receptor is and how much of the neurotransmitter is binding.  It’s not completely straightforward (for instance, if the signal decreases, it could mean more neurotransmitter is taking up the receptors OR it could mean there are fewer receptors there in general).

This is a PET image of a healthy control and an early/late-stage AD patient’s brain.  This type of PET is glucose-based, so it’s just tracking overall brain metabolism.  You can see the early AD brain is already decreased in overall glucose metabolism (how much energy the brain is using), and by the late stage, it is severely decreased.  This is likely due to the severe, progressive neurodegeneration that occurs in AD.

[Image Source]

letmypeopleshow:

Going Medieval on that Mouse:

In the ancient Americas and in Egypt, felines were praised, revered, and even worshipped. Not so in Europe. (Hence the book The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History.) Read more in  ”How to Swing a Mouse: Intersections of Female and Feline in Medieval Europe,” a cat-and-mouse game with art history (sorry!) posted on medievalists.net just in time for Halloween.  

Ashmole Bestiary, late 12th to early 13th century, Bodliean Library

letmypeopleshow:

Shepard Fairey: What a Relief!

Shepard Fairey’s Pace Prints show, titled “Harmony and Discord,” conveys the agit-prop message for which the Obama Hope  artist is well-known: one series, Reagan and Friends, depicts the former president, along with Richard Nixon and other corporate types, as corrupt salesmen. Others riff on global warming, the dove of peace, and a grenade that could pave the way for a revolution.

But this political commentary is delivered in particularly seductive and tactile images that show the artist exploring technique as well as the powerful influence of artists he admires. Targets and comic-book text bubbles riff on Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Rugged, handmade paper is the ground for some of the editions, made with a mix of stenciling, spray paint, embossing, and relief printing. And, for the first time (in an inspiration he credits to Barbara Kruger), Fairey experimented with the magnesium printing plate itself as a ground, reveling in its relief surface as he layered color on top. (He had special plates made so the pictures wouldn’t be flopped.) 

At the opening, the artist also revealed his next project: paintings inspired by every song on Americana, the new album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse covering classics like “Oh Susannah,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “Clementine.” The works, to be exhibited at a private, one-day event to celebrate the album’s release at Perry Rubenstein’s new Hollywood gallery next month, were the result of an elaborate back-and-forth process between artist and musician. “It was a genuine collaboration,” says Fairey, who describes the resulting images as “heroic but with a dark twist.

Detail of “Rise Above Rebel (Plate),” 2012, hand-rubbed, rolled, and transferred ink on photo-etched magnesium plate. 32 x 24”; edition of five. Courtesy the artist and Pace Prints, New York. 

letmypeopleshow:

Get Your Kicks from Schútte’s Nix Pix:

An image from “Volume II (The Big Nix),” 2005, Thomas Schütte’s portfolio of 17 color etchings with letterpress and 5 text pages, on view in his show at Carolina Nitsch in Chelsea through Saturday.

niborama:

Carlo’s Rhinoplasty:

Just because this show in Long Island is called “Nose Job,” don’t get the wrong idea. Or do—curator Carlo McCormick intended it partly as an homage to Andy Warhol’s Before and After. But the noses in this show, at the Eric Firestone gallery in East Hampton from  July 15-Aug. 21, are the nose cones of airplanes that McCormick scavenged in Arizona and then gave to a bunch of artists to paint. The list includes Jane Dickson, Swoon, Kenny Scharf, Shepard Fairey, Richard Prince, and Lee Quinones, among others.This one’s by How & Nosm, a team of twin brothers who come from Germany, live in the Bronx, and collaborate as  “not just graffiti artists.” 

(via letmypeopleshow)

neurolove:

Ramón y Cajal draws the hippocampus.  For more information about the hippocampus, see this old post!  If you like making memories, you like your hippocampus.  The hippocampus cycles new information to encode it into memories and then stores it in cortex.  Memories that you’ve made recently are still held in the hippocampus, but older memories are stored in cortex- the place where they were first encoded (i.e. auditory memories would go in the temporal lobe, which is where auditory information is processed).  This is why HM, who had his hippocampus removed, could still remember everything from before about a year before his hippocampus was surgically removed but could not form new memories afterwards.  I’ll talk more about HM another time.

[Image Source]