{"id":218799,"date":"2024-10-09T00:00:29","date_gmt":"2024-10-09T04:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/?p=218799"},"modified":"2024-10-11T11:29:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T15:29:41","slug":"how-neuroscience-comics-add-ka-pow-to-the-field-qa-with-kanaka-rajan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/craft-and-careers\/how-neuroscience-comics-add-ka-pow-to-the-field-qa-with-kanaka-rajan\/","title":{"rendered":"How neuroscience comics add <span style=\"font-family: Comic Sans MS\", \"Comic Sans\">KA-POW!<\/span> to the field: Q&#038;A with Kanaka Rajan"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The artistic approach can help explain complex ideas frame by frame without diluting the science, Rajan says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":""},"categories":[139],"tags":[141,165,200,143,170,192,207],"acf":{"primary_tag":170,"doi_url":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.53053\/SIFL8959","custom_js_library":"","hero_type":"feat_image","hero_alt_image":null,"hero_youtube":"","hero_video":null,"hero_layout":"full","hero_caption":"","hero_by":"Illustration by","hero_credit":218812,"hero_bg_color":"none","authors":[208055],"other_authors":"","related_title":"Explore more from <em>The Transmitter<\/em>","related_hide":false,"related_filter":"latest","related_tag":null,"related_category":null,"related_custom":{"articles":null},"recommended_title":"Recommended reading","recommended_hide":false,"recommended_filter":"latest","recommended_tag":null,"recommended_category":null,"recommended_custom":{"articles":null},"comps":[{"acf_fc_layout":"copy_comp","copy":"Kanaka Rajan says it took her twice as long as it should have to complete her Ph.D. in computational neuroscience\u2014because she had to decipher \u201cinscrutable physics papers. It turns out, they weren\u2019t that hard. They were just written badly.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow associate professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, <a href=\"https:\/\/neuro.hms.harvard.edu\/faculty-staff\/kanaka-rajan\">Rajan<\/a> tries to make her own scientific papers more comprehensible\u2014through comic strips.\r\n\r\nRajan, who herself sketches regularly, began collaborating with professional artists in 2018 to make narrative illustrations to explain the findings in some of her papers. The comics, she found, helped make computational neuroscience accessible to students who have little scientific training.\r\n\r\nOver the past five years, the practice of including comics in scientific papers has taken off, Rajan and several illustrators say. Neuroscientist and artist <a href=\"https:\/\/matteofarinella.com\/\">Matteo Farinella<\/a>, who co-wrote and illustrated the neuroscience-focused graphic novel \u201cNeurocomic\u201d more than 10 years ago, says that today\u2019s demand for artistic collaborations is the highest he has seen.\r\n\r\nCreating comics also has some personal benefits, Rajan adds: Her papers that feature comic illustrations have an \u201cexponentially higher\u201d number of citations than her other papers. \u201cPeople have written to us. More people have downloaded the GitHub where the code lives. Students have written or have talked to me. The h-index is better! The comic disseminates the work in a deeper way.\u201d\r\n\r\n<em>The Transmitter<\/em> spoke with Rajan about how comics can aid scientific research and how other neuroscientists can try the approach in their own work."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image_comp","aspect_ratio":"inline3-2","title":"","image":218824,"link":"","image_caption":"","image_byline":{"by":"Courtesy of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute \/","credit":218810}},{"acf_fc_layout":"copy_comp","copy":"<em>This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em>\r\n\r\n<strong><em>The Transmitter<\/em><\/strong><strong>: How did you become interested in incorporating comics into science?\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>Kanaka Rajan:<\/strong> I had two points of entry: One is that I sketch a lot. I think everything is interesting once you draw it; it helps your brain process things.\r\n\r\nThe other point was realizing that scientific papers are kind of an awful medium. They\u2019re incomprehensible. It\u2019s kind of a secret form of gatekeeping. As if we keep our science special sounding, then it will attract only the luminous geniuses. That thinking has led to several problems in the field that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts alone will not be able to solve. The pipeline is leaky everywhere.\r\n\r\nSo one of the concrete things is to democratize access to the information in my papers. The content in it is not 200 years of physics you have to learn. It\u2019s high school linear algebra for the most part. It\u2019s programming, which pretty much every high school student can do. A dedicated high school student or an undergrad can ramp up to a research problem very fast.\r\n\r\n<strong>TT: Why are comics effective at lowering some of those barriers to entry in neuroscience?\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>KR:<\/strong> In making comics, we\u2019re not diluting the content. We\u2019re just removing jargon from it. We\u2019re democratizing access to it, and we\u2019re turning technical details into schematics and graphics. That\u2019s it.\r\n\r\nWe\u2019re not stupidifying the work. I\u2019m making it visually engaging without jargon. We\u2019re saying, \u201cCome play with us; the sandbox is open.\u201d We\u2019re not saying, \u201cWe\u2019re luminous geniuses and we have special sand.\u201d\r\n\r\n<strong>TT: Do you have an example of when working with a comic illustrator helped make your work more accessible?\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>KR:<\/strong> One year, I was asked to lead a workshop at the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) meeting. I was meant to teach them foundations of why it is that neural network models are such a big deal in neuroscience. And when I was trying to explain that on my own, without a professional artist, I tried to use the metaphor of a lightbulb. I said, \u201cWhen we first built models of the brain, we were building models that were like lightbulbs, but the problem with those models is that they didn\u2019t do anything. When they tried to do something, they would blow up.\u201d\r\n\r\nThen, once the field started using nonlinear recurrent neural networks (RNNs), we needed a new metaphor. We had this lightbulb that blew up, and we turned it into a lava lamp, because now you have interesting dynamics within the model. But in a lava lamp, these interesting dynamics are all chaotic: Every time I turned it on, it was a different pattern.\r\n\r\nSo the thesis of my talk was that, if you add inputs to the model, you can quench the chaos somewhat\u2014and then you can get reliable responses.\r\n\r\nThere are lots of ways in which the lightbulb analogy is imperfect, though. For one thing, it\u2019s just this one object. And everyone knows that when the switch is off, the brain doesn\u2019t shut down. It\u2019s contrived at best.\r\n\r\nNow let me show you what happens when a professional takes over: Here comes <a href=\"https:\/\/jordancollver.myportfolio.com\/\">Jordan Collver<\/a>, who is an illustrator and science communicator. And he turns that story into a comic that contains the exact same content but with a completely different metaphor. He said forget the lightbulbs; get to the meat of the problem: What does it mean to train a network? He was like, \u201cI don\u2019t have a metaphor to connect lightbulbs with training of a model. But I do for Lego blocks.\u201d\r\n\r\nEveryone knows Lego blocks. They come in different colors. There are various shapes of them already. You can mix and match them. The metaphor was just so beautiful and adaptable, flexible and universal, that it basically left the lightbulb in the dust."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image_comp","aspect_ratio":"inline","title":"","image":218820,"link":"","image_caption":"","image_byline":{"by":"Courtesy of","credit":218812}},{"acf_fc_layout":"copy_comp","copy":"<strong>TT: Have you seen a difference in how people respond to the Lego explanation rather than the lightbulb?<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>KR:<\/strong> People have seen this and written me emails saying that now they understand what it means. Now they can read articles about artificial intelligence machine learning, and they go, \u201cOh, my God, now I know what they\u2019re talking about.\u201d\r\n\r\nAnother example is that I recently gave a webinar and talked about how, in the RNN models I build, I think about inter-area communication a lot: What information is passed within and across brain areas to make your brain work. We think about these flow fields and flow of activations between active neurons bidirectionally, and which type of neuron is projecting to which other type of neuron and so forth, all the time.\r\n\r\nAfter the webinar, this physicist wrote to me and said, \u201cYou know, there are techniques in physics, such as persistent homology with weights, that you can use to extract these types of directional flow quantities. Have you considered those?\u201d\r\n\r\nI was like, \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t know that existed. But thank you!\u201d Now I have a whole other set of techniques to read.\r\n\r\n<strong>TT: What are some of the other benefits you see?\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>KR:<\/strong> Well, the person who is funding the research is the taxpayer, and they don\u2019t know what the paper is about as it\u2019s written. Given that public trust in science is at an all-time low, I find this important.\r\n\r\nMore selfishly, people have to reach funders. They have to reach program officers. They want to reach what I will call the earnest public\u2014scientifically literate readers of <em>The New Yorker<\/em>, for instance. They want to reach them, but they can\u2019t with jargon alone.\r\n\r\n<strong>TT: What would you tell other neuroscientists who want to get started working on collaborations with illustrators?<\/strong>\r\n\r\n<strong>KR:<\/strong> I would say message artists you like and say, \u201cLook, I have an idea for you. I have this paper. I would like to turn that into a comic strip.\u201d People usually respond.\u00a0X, honestly, even with its problems, is great for this.\r\n\r\nAnother thing to keep in mind is that you can write the costs of these things into grants now. No one writes papers now where they\u2019ve slapped together their Python figures; they have professional artists make multi-panel figures using Illustrator. People do that already, but there is this whole other venue for representing your work visually."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image_comp","aspect_ratio":"inline","title":"","image":218823,"link":"","image_caption":"","image_byline":{"by":"Courtesy of","credit":218812}},{"acf_fc_layout":"newsletter","title":"Sign up for our weekly newsletter.","subtitle":" Catch up on what you may have missed from our recent coverage.","bg_image":200913,"groups":[{"group":"4","name":"","hide_checkbox":true}],"linktext":"","linkurl":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"callout_comp","callout_title":"Correction: ","callout_copy":"A previous version of this story included an incorrect title for Kanaka Rajan.","callout_color":"red"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218799"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218799"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218972,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218799\/revisions\/218972"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor\/208055"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor\/218812"}],"acf:term":[{"embeddable":true,"taxonomy":"post_tag","href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags\/170"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetransmitter.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}