Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos, PhD, has long been fascinated by space. Specifically, the physical space occupied by the brain. "Inside our heads, the brain is all crumpled up. If you flattened out the human cortex into a single 2D sheet, it would cover two and a half square feet of space — roughly the size of four pieces of paper. You would think that the brain would take advantage of all that space when organizing activity patterns, but aside from knowing that one patch of the brain controls the arm and another controls the leg, we’ve mostly ignored how the brain might use that spatial organization," he says.
About the Author
