On the Fractal Design in Human Brain and Nervous Tissue

Abstract

Digital imaging techniques have enabled to gain insight into complex structure-functional processes involved in the neo-cortex maturation and in brain development, already recognized in anatomical and histological preparations. Despite such a refined technical progress most diagnostic records sound still elusive and unreliable because of use of conventional morphometric approaches based on a unique scale of measure, inadequate for investigating irregular cellular components and structures which shape nervous and brain tissues. Instead, these could be efficiently analyzed by adopting principles and methodologies derived from the Fractal Geometry. Through his masterpiece, The Fractal Geometry of Nature [1] , Beno î t Mandelbrot has provided a novel epistemological framework for interpreting the real life and the natural world as they are, preventing whatever approximation or subjective sight. Founded upon a body of well-defined laws and coherent principles, the Fractal Geometry is a powerful tool for recognizing and quantitatively describing a good many kinds of complex shapes, living forms, organized patterns, and morphologic features long range correlated with a broad network of functional interactions and metabolic processes that contribute to building up adaptive responses making life sustainable. Scale free dynamics characterized biological systems which develop through the iteration of single generators on different scales thus preserving proper self-similar traits. In the last decades several studies have contributed to showing how relevant may be the recognition of fractal properties for a better understanding of brain and nervous tissues either in healthy conditions or in altered and pathological states.