I consider myself very lucky for having worked as a neuroscientist in different labs in different countries. And I consider myself very lucky as well for having stopped doing so. My first luck stands for the privilege I had for spending almost 12 years of my life immersed in a scientific environment and hours and hours looking at neurons through the lens of a microscope. The beauty lodged in neurons, especially when surrounding by their neighborhood, is magnificent. Not every scientist gets this opportunity. Very often researchers focus on the neuronal molecular components and from that perspective only see grey stains plotted on a paper or numbers displayed on a computer screen. This is not a problem, the molecular dimension does not take away the beauty of the neurons, rather it translates it into a sense of infinity. No matter how you look at them, neurons own a mysterious grace.

My second luck came after leaving my lab life and not being able to look at neurons anymore, or rather being able to look at them through different eyes and with other purposes than to make experiments. I am fascinated by neurobiology and being a housewife did not make me lose my interest. Quite the opposite, I have the freedom to choose what to read about it. And without having to focus on the information you need to grasp from papers to validate your own experiments but rather on a deep curiosity for understanding how neurons and other cells allow us to relate with the world we live in, I came to notice the lack of allure that neuroscience texts offer to people other than scientists. And the idea of writing a book started to gain space in my mind in a form of an art-neuroscience project. I wanted to use art as support for understanding neurobiology concepts instead of the schematic drawings of neuroscience texts or the pictures of neurons shown in papers. Neurons are not like in those drawings. Neurons are not like in the pictures with fluorescent colors inside the brain where not much light can illuminate them. Neurons are not even like we see them though the microscope after having treated them with so many chemicals. I thought if I ever write that book I will not use any scientific image of neurons but anything else that can make the reader imagine them to their own taste, travel within them toward infinity.

I was very sure about the content: how neurons communicate with each other and how drugs interfere with the harmonious neuronal connection.

I was a kid in the 80’s when Spain was dramatically affected by drugs consumption. Much much before Netflix launched Narcos, Pablo Escobar was a main protagonist on the Spanish tv news and then at my family weekend lunches. He was not the only person who scared me. I was also terrified by the human copy of the White Walkers whose bodies encrusted with syringes rested against The Wall of my apartment block. Far from the vaccine shots we got at School to not became ill, I learnt that those syringes were filled with something called heroin that could even kill you. I get used to the tv advertisements where syringes were labelled with the letters AIDS or where a big worm was slowly entering a nose and I think nearly every kid living in Spain during the 80’s had the sentence “DRUGS ARE BAD” written in their brain.

But the horror image about consuming drugs that I had from childhood changed completely during the year 2000. By then I wasn’t a kid anymore but a young explorer and Spain was the land of discos, raves and parties where drugs were a must. And sincerely if you were in, you were not at all the heroin of the White Walkers. You were the heroin Khaleesi, gorgeous, brave, sensual and dominating your dragons. You were the Queen. Clearly there was a mismatch between what we had been taught about drugs and how you actually felt if you taste them. How to dance the Song of Ice and Fire?

In my opinion saying just “say no to drugs” when in most of the cases their immediate effect is so pleasurable is confusing and might not be enough to prevent people from taking the risk of consuming these substances. And where there is confusion there is a need of understanding. Being a neuroscientist I wanted to shed a little light over this dichotomy. Nothing new as indeed the information is already available in so many books, webs and other media. My intention was to attract readers to that information using drawings and paintings made by artists. If they felt pulled towards a particular image and curious to understand why it was there, they needed to read the text and along the way learn something about neurons and how drugs work on them.

My plan was first to explain in detail a neurobiology piece of information to an artist and let him or her express it on a canvas or a paper. I would take care of writing a little about how neurons communicate with each other, where different drugs attach to neuronal contacts, what they do there, why yes! they make us feel good and why no! you’d better do not abuse them as so they quickly became a difficult challenge to overcome for the brain. We all are so different and drugs do not affect everybody in the same manner but at the neuronal level they all make quite the same thing. I wanted to explain this “quite the same thing” so that with very few neurons in mind and recognizing that our brain is like a neuronal connected universe people would be able to infer alone how consuming drugs ultimately reflects on our emotions, changes our behaviour and affects our life. Knowing which notes are played on a neuron that has surrendered itself to drugs and how far the neuronal music reaches into the brain, it’s then up to us whether to dance our own song or step into drug-driven beats.

But apart of mails, I had never written anything else other than scientific papers, neither was I in contact with artists. The project was a very new and challenging thing to me and I had no idea where to start.

In the fourth year of Neurobiology at the University of Madrid I had a subject entitled “Action Mechanisms of Psychoactive Agents”. With such a long name I had no clue at the beginning of the academic year that the whole subject was just about drugs. I had a great teacher, Professor Maria-Paz Viveros, and I was so fortunate to join her laboratory at the University during my free time. It was the perfect lab to learn honesty and the advantage of collaboration over competition. In parallel to train her lab students at the bench, Prof. Maria-Paz Viveros strongly encouraged us to acquire a solid theoretical background and nearly every paper she made us read mentioned at least one of the brain structures of “the pleasure circuit of the brain”, the ones who are conquered by drugs. Thanks to her guidance I joined a research group at the Cajal Institute after graduating at the University.

I did my PhD at the Cajal Institute and there again I was mentored by an excellent person, Prof. Jose Borrell, and surrounded by a very friendly team. My research was aimed at developing an animal model able to mimic some symptoms described in Schizophrenia. I worked with rats, treated them with injections, tested them on behavioral trials and eventually measured molecular markers in the very same brain structures of the “pleasure circuit of the brain”. I became an expert at dissecting the hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, the frontal cortex, the striatum, the amygdala, the locus coerouleous and more, and the strange names of these brain structures became incorporated into my basic vocabulary.

Hands-on to start the neuroscience-art project I soon realized that to explain it to an artist I will inevitably need to dip into the brain and bring some of its structures out. I had my starting point. And the very first thing I made for the project was an illustration of the anatomy of the brain to use it as a tool for working with the artists. I built a pnemotecnic brain cutting and pasting images with my computer so that they could easily identify and localize some of its structures.

It was at the time I was busy with the brain anatomy collage that my husband joined an Indian group to play saxophone with them. They played a fusion of jazz and carnatic music and thanks to the group our family began to be familiar with the, till then unfamiliar to us, Indian musical system.

I am Spanish but I have lived in India for the last 11 years. I have been writing that book in my mother tongue, Spanish. But I have been learning from the art, music and culture of this country that I now call Mother India. I have met artists and musicians from here who have showed me a strong motivation on the project and I have learnt so much from our interactions. The process of looking for artistic representations and metaphors to illustrate my writings has make me enjoy science and my personal life in a very enriching way. The book is titled “Raga de las neuronas al son de las drogas” which more or less translates into English as “Raga of Neurons set to the Rhythm of Drugs”. Raga is a whole group of musical concepts in Indian classical music but the word comes from Sanskrit and literally means “color” or “mood”. “Ranjayathi iti Raga” is a Sanskrit saying meaning “that what colors the mind is a raga”.

In “Raga de las neuronas al son de las drogas” I used a metaphor with the Indian classical music and culture to write the neurobiology content and I intended it to be illustrated by Indian artists. But it is an unfinished book as it itself has its own story and went its own way. The creation of WeMind comes from a halfway stop in the “Raga of the Neurons” journey. I plan to keep writing about some of the stories from the book in the general concepts section of this website. I start with the “Brain Anatomy” collage I made a long time back hoping that it will inspire some artists wherever they are in the world and hopefully encourage them to participate in WeMind with their own interpretation of the Anatomy of the Brain.

Thank you for reading!

Eva