“Everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” says Elles Raaijmakers of Eindhoven University of Technology about her research. Her dissertation, on the brain under power, is a difficult delivery. To give her frustration and inspiration a place, she therefore begins to sketch her thoughts. It has become a comic book. A dissertation, about complex neuroscience, in the form of a comic. And other people also seem to like it very much.
It is fifty pages of comic strip, in addition to her ‘normal’ dissertation. The story goes through Frankenstein and Romans who delivered electric shocks with an electric ray, eventually ending up with her own thesis on the influence of electric fields on brain cells. “How much work was this?” Raaijmakers muses. “You can no longer speak of hours here.”
The idea of her comic strip originates on the train. During the research, the PhD student spends four hours a day on public transport, commuting between the universities of Eindhoven and Amsterdam. She has been drawing for a long time and likes it, so it feels like a logical move to also sketch her frustrations and inspirations. Visually and with a bit of humor. So that, between all the brain research, her own brain also gets some rest.
Raaijmakers’ research did not run smoothly. “We thought that a handful of measurements were enough, but that took longer and longer. Four years became five years, five years became six and six became seven. Actually, everything that could go wrong was wrong,” she says with an ironic smile.
She finds it super frustrating. And as a result, drawing for the PhD candidate is becoming increasingly important. “It became my way of coping with setbacks,” she explains. For example, she shows a drawing by scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish biologist who studied the tissue of organisms. This print alone has taken her a week.
He’s standing by a cluttered desk, with a few bottles of wine on the shelf behind him. “He was an outsider, but grew into the father of neuroscience,” says Raaijmakers with admiration. It wasn’t all plain sailing for him either. And he also made it visual.
But her comics have even more advantages. People who would normally never read further in a stately dissertation, become curious because of the illustrations. It makes things a bit more accessible.
In her story, Raaijmakers takes the reader on a journey through the history of neuroscience. Along Frankenstein, for example, or Nobel Prize winner Hodgkin. Or the Romans, who delivered electric shocks with an electric ray, only to end up with her own thesis. “People who wouldn’t normally open my research can now understand why I did it.”
She has now defended her dissertation and has shown that her research initiates all kinds of growth and learning processes in the nerve cells of the memory area. And that you can make a comic book about that.
