In the March issue of Scientific American Carl Schoonover, author of Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, describes a new computer-modeling technique that allows researchers to zoom in on the smallest components of the active brain in 3-D. To accompany the story, we've collected images from his recent book, which describes the tools that scientists have used to observe the nervous system from the second century to the present. During the past 20 years, breakthroughs in these technologies have fueled unprecedented advances in neuroscience.

 

View the slide show of brain images from the lab.