Purkinje Cells and Granule Cells From Pigeon Cerebellum, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Instituto Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Wikimedia Commons, Date Accessed: May 7, 2020.
“Nature is a harmonious mechanism where all parts, including those appearing to play a secondary role, cooperate in the functional whole.” – Santiago Ramón y Cajal
· Out on my back patio I am gazing at the silhouette of black trees set against a blue grey Colorado sky. Like so many of the famed neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s neuron drawings, the branches intertwine to form a dense network of life. Each individual branch contributes to the overall brilliance of the display. The illustrations of neuron forests that Cajal is so famous for exhibit the same dense connectivity, with individual neurons weaving to and fro in a montage of organized chaos. Much like the leaves on the tree forming a net to receive sunlight, the dendrites on Cajal’s Purkinje cells reach out to receive impulses from other neurons. In Cajal’s time, little was known about how the organization of these independent cells contributed to the functioning of the human brain. Now over 100 years after the start of these pivotal drawings more is known at both the cellular and cognitive level. Perhaps Cajal even had an intuition that the glial cells so often depicted in his cellular renderings were much more than meets the eye. His observations on the importance of all the secondary contributions in nature were far ahead of his time. Today, how many times can we write a great algorithm, only to have the program fail because of a flaw in its dependencies. Doctors around the world have always grappled with prescribing the “right” medication for a patient, due to the complexity of secondary drug interactions. Even the most beautiful oil portrait can look unappealing if presented in a gallery with the wrong lighting conditions. With modern technology moving at such a quick pace, it’s important to take a moment to appreciate all of the smaller parts which make up the cohesive whole. When we start looking at the individual parameters and components, even those of trivial importance, we may be able to better see the forest through the trees.