It all started at the bar at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting more than 10 years ago. A scientist pulled out his iPad and began showing Tyler Sloan, then a neuroscience graduate student, a 3D video that flew through the bundled nerve fibers of the spinal cord in a tissue-cleared embryo. “My first thought when I saw that was that we need to put this on a planetarium dome,” Sloan says.
The video reflected a turning point in microscopy imaging, when techniques such as Clarity, which enables high-resolution imaging of intact tissue, made it possible to image relatively large volumes of the brain and illustrate the nervous system’s complexity in all its glory.
Inspired by the public engagement he saw at astronomy screenings at planetariums, Sloan wanted to employ these kinds of videos to kindle the same sense of awe toward the brain. He began learning 3D animation, eventually leaving academia and launching his own company to create sophisticated visualizations for scientists.
But, he says, it was all in service of his goal to make an immersive brain movie for the public. More than a decade after the idea took root, the project has finally borne fruit: Sloan’s planetarium film premiered during the weeklong BrainFest event in Seattle in March. Other showings are in the works, including at Neuroscience Academy Denmark’s annual meeting in November. Sloan says he plans to make the film freely available and hopes it will eventually be shown at planetariums around the world.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Transmitter: You note that astrophysicists have done a remarkable job at outreach to the public, through interactive planetarium films. How can neuroscientists try to emulate that?
Tyler Sloan: We can do a better job of inspiring people with a sense of awe. I went to a national park in Canada with an observatory over spring break with my family. Their outreach is really elaborate; they have an emcee and what they call the cosmic jockey, the technician operating the computer in the background and throwing up images throughout the entire presentation. I was amazed at the level of questions coming from school-aged kids. There’s something that has worked for them in engaging people in the sense of awe and wonder. It’s not because the cosmos is more interesting or more beautiful than the operation of the human brain. It’s just that they have taken that place inside of public awareness. And I think that’s something we can do too.
TT: How have you parlayed this into a neuroscience film?
TS: We had a collaboration already in place between the Allen Institute and the Pacific Science Center; they wanted to put together a planetarium film as part of their annual BrainFest event. It was the perfect opportunity to really test this out on a relatively small scale, to create something that could then be used more widely, following their open-science principles.
TT: What does it take to make a planetarium film about the brain?
TS: Lots of data, lots of 3D models, a lot of back-end analytical programming. I’ve been in the business for a while, so I know what’s available and have already worked with a lot of these models. I’m also really lucky that I live a short walk from a planetarium, and I know the technicians there, who have been very generous with their time, allowing me to go and test content out on the dome directly.
Designing a normal 3D animation, like I do for most of my business, is very different than designing a static graphic that’s shown in a paper or in a press release. There is a whole compositional artistry that goes into highlighting a very specific subset of the image. You can use artistic effects like depth of field and highlighting in order to direct the viewer’s attention through the course of the video. Moving from a normal 3D animation into a planetarium film has a whole other level of complexity. Your audience is actually embedded inside of a 3D scene. It’s an entirely different type of design principle, because you have to be very attentive to motion. In the industry, they call it the “barf test,” which is to find the most motion-sensitive person who works in a given theater and invite them to see an early version of a film. Because if things move too fast, if something spins too quickly, then people will get dizzy. The visual effect of being immersed in the content is extremely persuasive.
TT: Does the film tell a neuroscience story?
TS: It looks at what happens inside of the brain when you see a shooting star. We bring the audience into a familiar setting with a starry sky. We zoom in to the retinal ganglion cells that are actually responding to the light and then start looking at visual centers in the brain—the actual optic tracks where these signals are being passed through the brain—using diffusion tensor imaging, MRI volumes and other techniques. We end the film with a data sonification of some of the new data out of the Eyewire 2 project and the MICrONS project, where we have these functional, connectomic reconstructions of the mouse brain. We use optical physiology datasets to create an audio file to add an audiovisualization of neural activity in the final stretch of the film.
TT: Does that mean you hear action potentials?
TS: Exactly. We ran a spike detector algorithm on the optical physiology trace collected while the mouse was performing a task. The animal’s brain is later reconstructed, and the optical imaging signal is aligned with each neuron in the actual reconstruction, so that we have this data sonification of actual neuron firing.
TT: You plan to make the film freely available to distribute at planetariums. Why is that so important to you?
TS: Because this was going to be the first real project of this type, we wanted to have the widest possible reach and the largest possible impact. That was one of the real benefits to working with the Allen Institute; their philosophy around open science is very clear.
We use the Creative Commons license, the idea being that local groups could add new content. Someone could use a core introductory segment and add a five-minute section about memory, if that’s something a lot of local researchers work on. You can also change the language—I live in Quebec, so we need to have a French version. You can really customize it, ensuring that anything that’s added also has that same open license. If this project grows as we hope, eventually we’ll have this pool of neuroscience planetarium content that can be drawn upon and remixed and used for outreach in any one of the 3,000-plus domes across the world. We hope to build collaborations with local science centers and do a whole new type of outreach.
From my discussions with people in the planetarium industry, there’s a constant need to produce new content, and they’re trying to branch out. I’m always framing this in terms of neuroscience, because that’s where my passion and my background is, but I think there are really interesting opportunities for all sorts of fields to use this immersive storytelling to engage with a wider audience.
TT: Many scientists I’ve spoken with are interested in doing more public outreach. Do you have suggestions for how to do that?
TS: A lot of what we rely on for communicating to the general public ends up being very simplified cartoon schematics. But I think there’s a growing trend to trust people with actual data. That’s something that astrophysics has done well in these planetarium films; they’re usually showing real data, real star surveys, real models.
In the comment sections on my videos, I hear from a lot of nonscientists who are blown away by what they’re able to see, because it’s all real. I think that we as a group should move beyond simplifications and be willing to share more real data; there’s a large section of the public who are able to comprehend real numbers and real values and real data. They’re being underserved by these sorts of simplified illustrations.
TT: Where and when can people see the movie?
Stay tuned for specific release dates.
