Do you feel a little like a butterfly now that we are coming out of Covid?
Or does the April and May vibes give us that caterpillar-turning-into-butterfly feeling, as winter morphs into spring (and soon summer)?
Time to leaving behind the baggage that is unproductive and negative, so we can evolve and continue and iterate.
Butterflies are some of the most beautiful specimens and there are about 17,500 species of them in the world, a symbol of transformation and resilience in change.
Do beautiful things emerge from the most unlikely and unpromising of things?
If you must, you should get hold of that book about the great neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, “The Brain in Search of Itself”, a wonderful biographer of this most excellent scientist which also reminds us that a transversal section – or cross section – of the spinal cord resembles a butterfly. The area of the spinal cord outside the butterfly shape is known as the white matter because it consists mainly of myelinated axons, which appear white under the microscope. Contents inside the butterfly shape, made up of numerous cell bodies and dendrites, are known as gray matter. Gray matter is so dense that even under the strongest microscope it looks like an “impenetrable thicket”, while white matter, due to its myelination, cannot be stained well.
Putting a small slant on this: we have the butterfly DNA inside of us!
Cajal, winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize for medicine and whose theories form the foundation of neuroscience today, combined cutting-edge scientific research with consummate draftsmanship to create groundbreaking drawings of the human brain and other nerve tissues, producing more than 3,000 drawings of the brain, works that are both aesthetically astonishing and scientifically significant.
(left: pyramidal neuron of the cerebral cortex)
(right: purkinje neuron from the human cerebellum)
And if it helps with the springtime morphing: Cajal also believed that the cerebral cortex, impenetrable and wild, is a “terrifying jungle”, and that it is only by force of will that human beings can transform “the tangled jungle of nerve cells” into “an orderly and delightful garden”.