In ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe,’ René Magritte faithfully depicts a pipe but all the same proclaims that it isn’t a pipe: it is a painting of a pipe. We allude to Magritte’s painting here, showing that by rebuilding a neuron’s anatomy, we create something that is not a neuron: it is the model of a neuron.

Image and quote from Cuntz et al., ‘The morphological identity of insect dendrites’, PLoS Computational Biology 4:e1000251. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000251

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