Editorial

The cover of this issue of Brain relates to a review of the intestinal barrier in multiple sclerosis by Carlos Camara-Lemarroy and colleagues, and reminds the reader that the CNS and its diseases should not be considered in isolation from the rest of the body. The illustrator and physician Fritz Kahn (1888–1968) produced many such infographics in the 1920s and 1930s. They were highly successful before they were suppressed in Nazi Germany, but never regained their pre-war popularity, perhaps because the visual analogies were deemed too simplistic. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the boxes and arrows that dominate textbooks, PowerPoint projections and scientific commentaries in Brain convey their messages better than telephone exchanges, bellows cameras, and assembly line workers working at conveyor belts. I for one still think of the liver as a storeroom, factory and recycling plant, so why cringe at these metaphors? Boxology, on the other hand, arguably perpetuates the increasingly barren search for functional localization: don't worry how the box operates, the only thing that matters is where it is. This is the trap of functional localization: although justified by the desire to explain the consequences of acquired brain lesions, it will always be limited by the assumption that grey matter regions perform computations in isolation.

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