Knit, purl, medulla oblongata

In the mid-1990s, child psychiatrist Karen Norberg was working the night shift in a hospital emergency room, and she was struggling to stay attentive during the frequent evening lulls. So she turned to a tried and tested hobby for whiling away long hours: knitting. She wasn't fashioning sweaters or darning socks, however. Instead, she harked back to her training in neuroscience. "I decided that a particularly absurd thing to do would be to knit a brain," she said.

Karen Norberg's Knitted Brain Click here for an enlarged and anatomically-labeled image Image courtesy of the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art

Once she started, she couldn't stop. The knitting migrated from a late-night time-killer to an after-work obsession. "I would rush home from work and say, 'Oh, I think I'll work on the corpus callosum tonight,'" Norberg, now a research instructor in psychiatry at Washington University's Center for Health Policy in St. Louis, told The Scientist.

Norberg then spent the better part of a year, knitting two to three hours per day, and flying through half dozen skeins of yarn, to meticulously craft her woolen brainchild. Using different colors to represent parts of the elaborate organ, she tried to make her brain as anatomically correct as possible: The visual cortex was a speckled blend of purple, blue, and turquoise; the motor cortex had folds of cream and winterfresh green; and the hippocampus was constructed with baby pink wool. The light fiber made working out the brain's 3D structure difficult, but Norberg's training came in handy. "Knowing the embryology helps understanding how all the parts fit together," she said.

Sarah Maloney's Brain, 2007 Image courtesy of Sarah Maloney

"It's quite an attractive piece," Karen Searle, a sculptor and the author of Knitting Art, told The Scientist. "It works quite well as an art piece as well as a scientific example or model."

But Norberg's heady project isn't the only knitted brain. Several other knitters and fabric artists have sought to portray the brain in cotton, wool or felt, too. An online museum even celebrates the body of fabric art that pays homage to the most curious of human organs.

Sarah Maloney, a contemporary artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, also knit two different brain models from fine cotton string. "The form of the brain suggests that use of materials," Maloney told The Scientist. "If you look at the surface of the brain it looks like these coils of knitting almost."

Debbie New, a Waterloo, Ontario-based artist and the author of Unexpected Knitting, knitted her own brain-inspired piece, too. Based on an image from Grey's Anatomy, New crafted a knitted "brain cap" that fits over one's scalp. "The attraction for me is the contrast between the medium and the idea," she told The Scientist. "It startles you and makes you look at things in a different light."

Sarah Maloney's Brain, 1999 Image courtesy of Sarah Maloney

Norberg's knitted brain sat in her kitchen on a small, exhibit stand for around a decade, until she took the piece along with her to a seminar given by Bill Harbaugh, a University of Oregon neuroeconomist. As it turned out, Harbough's wife, Marjorie Taylor, was also a scientist by day and a neuro-anatomical fabric artist by night. Taylor's medium of choice, however, was quilting.

Taylor used velvet to portray the folds of the cerebral cortex, depicted PET scans linked to speech recognition using a special cut-out quilting method ("PET scans really lend themselves to reverse appliqué," according to Taylor), and is currently working on a traditional Nova Scotian rug that shows fMRI activation images. "Our niche is that we're really trying to be scientifically accurate to the extent that you can be when working with fabric," Taylor, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, told The Scientist.

Marjorie Taylor's Mark's Brain Image courtesy of the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art

Harbaugh became the "curator" of a website to host images of both Norberg and Taylor's work, which he calls the online Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art. "The rest is history," Norberg said. "A lot of people found the website and it generated a certain amount of interest." The Museum of Science in Boston discovered the woolen brain around four years ago, and they have displayed it in their collections ever since. Taylor's work now hangs in her home and in various offices around the University of Oregon.

Taylor and Norberg don't take themselves too seriously, though. "It's a whimsical, ridiculously complicated thing to do without any special reward in mind except for the fun I had in doing it," said Norberg. Taylor added: "It's just a strange juxtaposition that makes people laugh." Still, there's a certain charm that emerges from both women's work, noted Taylor. "Any neuroscientist is struck by just how beautiful the images are that they're getting in their science."

Update (Feb. 6): An earlier version of this article misspelled the corpus callosum and mislabeled the motor cortex in the knitted brain. The Scientist regrets the errors.


Related stories:

Knitting and braiding aren't just for grandmothers
[13th June 1988]

Balancing life and science
[January 2009]