It presents 80 small notebook renderings in shifting combinations of ink and pencil by the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) that are considered among the world’s greatest scientific illustrations. Together they describe a fantastic netherworld of floating forms, linear networks, bristling nodes and torrential energies. They posit the thing between your ears as an immense cosmic universe, or at least one of the most intricate of all of nature’s creations. That the images are also undeniable as art only adds to the complexity of the experience.

Cajal is considered the father of modern neuroscience, as important in his field as Charles Darwin or Louis Pasteur are in theirs (though relatively unknown outside of it). His discoveries, made during the last dozen years of the 19th-century, concern the way neurons, the building blocks of the brain, spinal cord and nervous system, communicate with one another. His theory — immediately accepted by most, but not strictly proven until the 1950s — was that neurons are in touch without touching. They communicate across infinitesimal gaps known as synaptic clefts. Through a chemical and electrical transmission, the single-stemmed axon of one neuron talks to the branched root-like dendrite of another.