Technique · Fields
Neuron
A nerve cell with branching dendrites, an axon, travelling signals and a blurred crowd behind it.
Neuron is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Santiago Ramon y Cajal drew neurons in the 1890s from slides stained with Golgi's silver method, and shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Camillo Golgi.
- Information travels in the nervous system as spikes of about 100 millivolts that last a millisecond or two.
- The brain contains roughly as many supporting cells as neurons.
- A motor neuron's axon can be a metre long, from the base of the spine to the toes, and it is still a single cell.
- Signals travel down an axon as a wave of voltage; in fibres wrapped in myelin they leap between the gaps at more than 100 metres per second.
The mathematics
- A smooth minimum blends two distance fields so that their union has no crease; one number sets how far the blend reaches.
- A cell with 6 main dendrites that each fork a few times soon has tens or even hundreds of tips; a real cortical neuron can receive thousands of contacts.
In art
- Cajal had wanted to be an artist, and his ink drawings of brain tissue are still admired as drawings.
- Diagrams of the nervous system have been drawn as trees since the nineteenth century, and the picture shaped how people thought about the thing itself.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Order to chaos · Fractal tree · Radiolarian shell