![]() ![]() ![]() A psychiatrist once sketched a neuron for me on a cocktail napkin he took from his pocket to explain the mechanism behind SSRIs. But, I knew nothing about the brain except that I had one, and it was causing me to suffer. That night, as an olive branch, my friend sent me an email with nothing but a link to a Wikipedia page of Cajal, who it said won the 1906 Nobel Prize for discovering neurons, which he called “butterflies of the soul.” I felt a sense of the poetic. My friend, who studied neuroscience and was a filmmaker, maintained that the two could be united, while I, who studied comparative literature and aspired to write, was skeptical of science. One day, my friend and I argued about whether it was possible to combine science and art or whether they would always be separate domains. ![]() My only activity was to help my friend shoot music videos for a shady entrepreneur trying to launch his preteen son’s band into pop stardom. At the time, I was so depressed that I had entered anhedonia, that vast terrain of feelinglessness. Twelve years ago, I saw an image of a brain cell drawn by a man whom I had never heard of, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and had what I recognize now was an awakening. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |