The importance of imagery in scientific research must be taken into account. For this you have to go back to Leonardo da Vinci with his famous work “The Vitruvian Man”; a drawing in which the study of the ideal proportions of man is scientifically manifested in its anatomical dimension.
Following this tradition, the scientific community developed a drawing skill that would be of paramount importance to the advances of medicine. Without going any further, at the end of the 19th century, Ramón y Cajal postulated the neuronal theory and discovered that the nervous system is made up of cells with various processes. With his neuronal discovery, Ramón y Cajal turned the previously prevailing “reticular theory” on its head, which envisaged a nervous system structured as a continuous network of fibers.
To explain his theory, Ramón y Cajal published a scientific article entitled “Structures of the Nerve Centers of Birds,” in which he pointed out that the nervous system is made up of cells that come into contact with each other through stimuli or nerve impulses. There were two images attached to the article; two histological drawings by himself showing microscopic sections of the cerebellum of a chicken and a pigeon.
As José M. Ramírez points out in his essay Diálogo y valoración (acvf), the above-mentioned drawings played a transcendental role because, in an international community of scientists of different nationalities, “the drawings spoke a common language.” When we look at Ramón y Cajal's histological drawings, the first thing that comes to mind is that they are works of avant-garde painting, achieved with drops of ink and random strokes that intertwine into a network-like tangle. However, when someone explains to us the scientific function of such drawings, the impression tends to disappear.
One can imagine that Ramón y Cajal arrived at the student residence in the mid-twenties to talk about his discoveries and illustrate his conference with these avant-garde-looking drawings in which neurons resemble spiders with thin and elongated legs, arthropods or insect hunters, the would soon become part of the imagination of Dalí, Lorca and Buñuel and would have a profound influence on those times in which the Surrealist movement represented the hegemony of the interwar period.
José M. Ramírez's essay takes us on a walk through these labyrinths; a gallery of mirrors in which images and words complement each other in their scientific dimension. Because with words we get images. Without going any further, the picture of the time was completed by Heraclitus with the help of words, depicting the different waters of the same river. Following his lecture, José M. Ramírez, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, presents us with the connections between the scientific method and the artistic world. We receive such synchronizations via our optical channel. The histological drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal are a clear example.
José M. Ramírez explains it based on Deleuze when he says that we grasp the image to transform it into a perception, since our vision is favored by the intellectual power of words. The conclusion we draw after reading this strange essay is that language is the first form of knowledge and that vision was favored by it. Without this influence, the scientific method would not exist.
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