I have always been enchanted by storytellers. I really appreciate when teachers or friends tell me something hard using metaphors, stories or figurative examples. This is the story of the collaboration between the Artist Matteo Farinella and the neuroscientist Hana Ros of University College London. Together, they created the graphic novel Neurocomic.
It is about a hapless character who is sucked into a human brain where he encounters bizarre creatures and famous neuroscientists. The main goal is introducing neuroscience (the neurochemical aspect) to as many people as possible.
When either explaining or thinking about scientific problems, I think we should always try to picture them. Because abstraction gives you a novel and broad point of view. As Farinella says, "we had to hide some details to better explain the topic, to better show the real aspect we want to describe."
Nonetheless, I would add, imagining problems is not as boring as graphs and formulae are!
I'm always impressed by those who can marry art and science, and I agree that storytelling can be a powerful medium. A couple of years ago I came across a series of manga books which were very popular with the kids I bought them for. They were called The Manga Guides and covered topics like Biochemistry, Calculus, Molecular Biology and Statistics. Sometimes a novel visual perspective brings an otherwise difficult or uninteresting subject to life.
ReplyDelete