It’s a common enough pastime on lazy summer days to lie on the grass gazing up at the sky and look for figures and faces in the clouds. But two professors at Johns Hopkins University, the New York Times reports, have turned their gaze from fluffy cumulonimbus clouds to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and believe they have discovered an anatomical drawing of the human brain hidden in plain sight in the first of Michelangelo’s nine panels on the book of Genesis where God separates light from darkness. The viewer of this panel sees God from below as he looks up and rends the darkness from the light. And if the viewer looks closely, Professor Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo insist, they will see in the bulging neck of God “the underside of the brain and the brain stem, with parts of the temporal lobe, the medulla, the pons and other structures clearly drawn.”
It’s probably worth noting that Suk and Tamargo are a medical illustrator and a neurosurgeon respectively. If this were a Rorschach test I would say they’ve got brains on the brain a little to much.
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