In the last years of the 19th century, Santiago Ramón y Cajal looked down into his microscope and was amazed; for the first time ever, he saw the clear shape of neurons, sharply standing out from their fuzzy surrounding.
The beautiful, mysterious landscape before his eyes would mark the beginning of modern neuroscience and become an endless source of fascination for scientists and artists alike. "What an unexpected spectacle!" Cajal wrote of his observations. "On the perfectly translucent yellow background, sparse black filaments appeared that were smooth and thin or thorny and thick, as well as black triangular, stellate, or fusiform bodies! One would have thought that they were designs in Chinese ink on transparent Japanese paper."/.../