Poetic Science: Bodies, brains and the art of experimentation

Saturday 5 April 2008 1:00PM

Meet polymath Ian Gibbins -- neuroscientist, anatomist and university professor by day; poet, performer and composer by night. In a unique audio portrait, All in the Mind takes you inside all of his worlds; contemplating cadavers, nerve cells and the creative arts.


Ian Gibbins to his anatomy class: So we've got our two cadavers set up which have been dissected so you can see some of the muscles.

Natasha Mitchell: Natasha Mitchell joining you for All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, welcome. Today, poetic science, bodies, brains and the art of experimentation, an audio portrait of a unique life in science. I'm taking you to meet Ian Gibbins from Adelaide's Flinders University. He heads up a lab and a department as a neuroscientist, is a professor of anatomy and a teacher -- but he's also a poet, a performer and a music composer; a real polymath. Ian's passionate about exploring the creative synergies between the arts and the sciences, between the flesh and the mind. And we're entering all of his worlds today, contemplating cadavers, nerve cells and the creative arts.

Student to Ian: When you say nerve-ends, how many nerves are in there?

Ian Gibbins: That's a good question. We'll do that later on, too. So you can use "nerve" in lots of different ways.

Logical Rationalism:

This we know:
The philosophers have speculated
That somewhere between
The emotional heart
And the metaphysical soul
Each of us hides
A personal and private demon.

However, this we also know:
For all of the power of parallel processing,
No global positioning system
Nor magnetic resonance scanner
Has managed to triangulate,
To tomographically compute
The location of any such beast.

Therefore, let us hypothesise
A series of novel modifications
To string theory, Newton's laws of motion
The genetic basis of heredity, a revision
Of all previous notions of good and evil;
Thus, let us declare with universal neutrality
That we have absolutely nothing to fear

Ian Gibbins to a student: The first thing is the skin. Look at this, this is really amazing stuff, it's tough, it feels like leather, looks like leather because it is leather.

Student: It's so weird, it's kind of like when you eat chicken. Just makes you realise we're just meat, really.

Student Belinda: I'm Belinda...we're just looking at a body for the first time and it's a bit nerve-racking at the start but it was a bit weird seeing facial hair and eye lashes and things, that was a bit weird for me. Yeah, and we've just peeled back the skin and we're looking at all the layers of muscles and can see blood vessels and all sorts of things.

Natasha Mitchell: The skin is an amazing texture isn't it, covered in hair.

Student Belinda: It's a lot tougher than I thought, and thicker actually.

Natasha Mitchell: Literally leather.

Student Belinda: Yes, it's weird.

Male student: What's all the white stuff?...

Ian Gibbins to another student: There's huge blood pressure in the carotid artery....

Probably a sacrifice:

I cannot tell you the manner of my death.
After all these centuries in the bog, the peat,
The deep encompassing darkness,
The enveloping mists and moss,
I have no knowledge, it is beyond my ken.

After all these centuries, I wonder
How it is, how it was, what difference
One more breath might have made,
The songs I might have sung,
The poems and sermons I might have heard

After all these centuries, the sun
Is more intense that I remember:
I must close my eyes to the unaccustomed glare;
I must retreat from the flashes and incandescent
Counter lighting floods you aim in my direction.

After all these centuries, I cannot walk away
From this place of outcasts and disembodied sprites:
My sandals and ceremonial capes have been purloined;
My feet, swathed in pristine cotton, linger in the distance,
Restless, beyond the power of my will.

The band around my neck no longer feels tight.
After all these centuries, its leather plaits,
Its strangling knots no longer cut my flesh.
Protected by my cap and your soft-gloved hands,
This is simply how things must turn out to be.

Ian Gibbins: 'Bog man' came from an article in National Geographic called 'Tales from the Bog' at the end of last year, an extraordinary set of photographs. There was a picture of a profile of this body that was dug up out of the bogs, I think this was in Denmark. Many of the references in here are to other features in the story so the feet swathed in pristine cotton was a photograph, an exhibit I think from a museum, of just the feet, or a foot of one of these bog people, beautifully protected in soft, white pure cotton....

...My name is Ian Gibbins, and I am currently Professor of Anatomy at Flinders University and by research profession I'm a neuroscientist and my major research is into how nerves communicate with each other at the cellular level. I record the activity of single nerve cells, the chemicals they use to communicate with each other. I do a lot of teaching, a lot of teaching in the medical course, science students. We've got a new program for school teachers on how the brain works, I keep the university running in various ways -- too much administration, the minimum I can get away with.

Natasha Mitchell: You're an anatomist, professor of anatomy, and a neuroscientist, and poet, and a musician, how do you fit all of these hats on the one head?

Ian Gibbins: It all comes out of the same head so it's only one hat, I think is the glib answer! It's all part of thinking about the world I suppose, really what you're trying to do is figure how the world works. And science does it in one particular way, art has another way and if you're lucky to have a foot in each camp you get a double view, you get a stereo view.

Ian Gibbins to his Autonomic Neurotransmission Lab colleagues: Meet everybody, this is Natasha from the ABC. Yvette, Daniel...Daniel is just starting up in science as an honours student.

I started writing at school, I was always good at English, I used to edit the school magazine. When I went to university while I was doing science as an undergraduate I used to take part in the Melbourne University writers' workshops regularly, poetry workshops and I was co-editor of the Melbourne University poetry magazine for a couple of years. And that was under the tutelage of fantastic poets like Chris Wallace-Crabbe and others in Melbourne at that time. And that was a really exciting environment. And it had always been in my mind that if I hadn't of got good enough marks or good enough aptitude to go on a do science I would have gone back to English and language; so that was always there.

Ian Gibbins to Natasha about a picture on his lab whiteboard, of he and his wife in black-tie dress: Yeah that's Judy, I don't (dress like) that very often...as these people would say.

Natasha Mitchell: What are you looking at?

Ian Gibbins: These are the nerves which respond to pain or inflammation, or something like that. And the cells which Yvette's localised here are the ones which almost certainly are the ones which make a blister hurt, or if you've got arthritis make your joints hurt, or if you're feeling just generally crook and painful and achey they could be involved in that as well. What we're really interested in is that there's almost certainly a whole bunch of these nerve cells which people haven't seen before and we working on what they are and where they go and how they connect up.


You know the way it is
The words the words
The words rushing out from somewhere
Somewhere, you know, between my ears
And all the hidden questions
All the flashing liquid crystals
While I rattle my joystick buttons
Simply trying to keep to time

I don't care what the plan may be
Double blinded and under control
My head encased in magnetite
False alarms, yes, rising and falling
Or the plates in my skull
Just kind of, you know, separated
To let the needles buzz and probe
And my cathode rays light up their room.

Natasha Mitchell: Tell us about that one.

Ian Gibbins: Partly it's thinking about people having their heads scanned in a MRI scanner and that involves massive magnetic fields, hence magnetite and people who have had that done say sometimes they feel a ringing in their head which is interesting in itself. And then the other part of it, in my research what I do is stick tiny, tiny fine glass electrodes into single nerve cells. So a single nerve cell is 30,000ths of a millimetre in diameter and I stick a little electrode in there and I can record the electro activity in the single nerve cell. Now the idea of having electrodes in your head and being recorded at the same time is the ultimate goal of lots of neuroscience so what would it be like to do it?

Natasha Mitchell: Why are you measuring the activity of a single nerve cell?

Ian Gibbins: Well the main thing we are interested in, the nerve cells we are interested in are the ones which control the internal organs, blood flow to the gastrointestinal tract for example, or to the urinary bladder, or the reproductive tract. The nerves we work on are the ones we can't control, the ones that work automatically, the ones which bring tears to your eyes, make you blush, make you blanche, give you goose-bumps, they're the nerves we work on. It is absolutely essential to life, if these things don't work you're dead.

Natasha Mitchell: I love the way, love your description of your scientific research underlying it you say, 'We are trying to figure out how our body and brain keeps itself going in the face of incessant attempts by the rest of the world to bring it to a stop.'

We are vulnerable beings it seems?

Ian Gibbins: We really are. And it's very easy to die, it's much harder to stay alive from a biological and I suppose in terms of the physics of the universe and all that sort of stuff. It's true, it doesn't take very much to kill you, it takes an awful lot of energy and work by your brain and your body to keep yourself going from minute to minute, second to second, day to day. So there's a bit of my brain there which while it's doing a fantastic job at the moment of controlling my breathing while I'm speaking to you, if I try to speak too long without taking a breath it's going to stop me talking and make sure I take a breath.

Natasha Mitchell: No wonder we're buggered at the end of the day!

Ian Gibbins: Exactly!

Natasha Mitchell: Art and science in the mind of a polymath. In the lab with neuroscientist, anatomist, professor and poet Ian Gibbins on All in the Mind. This is ABC Radio National with me Natasha Mitchell reaching globally on Radio Australia and as podcast.

Ian Gibbins: We're heading into my little secret room.

Natasha Mitchell: We've got a rack of gear here with lots of knobs and buttons and wires. It looks like a recording studio -- suitably chaotic and in front of us we've got a...

Ian Gibbins: Fluorescence microscope.

Natasha Mitchell: ...A you-beaut fluorescence microscope. So give us a sense of a typical experiment that you'd undertake here with one single nerve cell.

Ian Gibbins: The first thing is it takes all day to get the tissue out of the animal, to find the little group of cells we are interested in, to set them all up so they are in the little dish so it doesn't vibrate, because you can't have any vibration anywhere, and then to connect up all the various little branches of the nerves to stimulating electrodes so we can activate the nerves. And then have everything positioned properly then to try and record the activity of single nerve cells.

Natasha Mitchell: So the nerve is effectively still alive?

Ian Gibbins: Yep, the nerve is absolutely alive, the nerves are kept alive by a special salt solution, it's sort of like what blood is made out of without all the red stuff.

Natasha Mitchell: You head up what is called the Autonomic Transmission Laboratory as well as heading up the anatomy and histology department here at Flinders. Autonomic (neuro) transmission sounds a bit like a sort of car part, but it's not, is it?

Ian Gibbins: Well it sort of is.

Natasha Mitchell: We thought of ourselves as cars but of course it's pointing to the fact that the nervous system is a pretty hierarchical system in our body, there's no one system -- there's many processing all our bodily experiences in parallel.

Ian Gibbins: Yes, that's as really good way of describing it. So the autonomic nerves, they're the ones which control internal organs. As we're standing here right now, our autonomic nerves are doing all sorts of things to keep us alive.

One of the things which is absolutely core I think to both enterprises is acknowledgement of uncertainty. In science you don't know how the world works and you try and figure out some bits of it. There are uncertainties all along the way: you don't know if your ideas are any good, you don't know if the world is working the way you think it is, you hope your instrumentation is all working properly, then having got your results you have to convince the rest of the scientific community, and the rest of the world maybe, that you've actually figured out this little piece of how the universe works.

Natasha Mitchell: That's uncertainty, or imagined worlds in science?

Ian Gibbins: Yes, that's it exactly.

Natasha Mitchell: In poetry you're also imagining alternative worlds?

Ian Gibbins: Yes, one of the key links between say poetry and science is that you have some idea but not quite how to get there but you have the idea and that's an imagined world. One of the things I do in my poetry, I often write it in first person, imagining a different point of view from a different context, sometimes from the point of view of a person I've read about, or some historical character or an animal sometimes. How does an animal see the world if an animal is sort of half human?

Natasha Mitchell: We've walked through the bowels of the medical centre, we've wandered down the rabbit warren-like corridors and we've landed at a very important location.

Ian Gibbins: Where we are now is in the anatomy teaching museum and it's a really special place, this is the sort of place where you normally are not allowed to come and we're doing things you are normally not allowed to do. We are dealing with -- to use the terms of the Anatomy Act -- the mortal remains of people who have donated their bodies to science.

Natasha Mitchell: These are in a sense they are exposing themselves as they have never known themselves?

Ian Gibbins: That's a good comment. And that's gradually changing with the improvements in medical imaging, things like MRI imagining and CT scans and computer reconstructions you can, if you happen to have something wrong with you, get a chance to have a look inside your own body but generally you don't. So what we're looking at here is certainly something the people themselves have never seen.

The donors:

No one is likely to argue
That, any time soon,
We will be moving far from here.

Not because our bones
Have become soft and yellow,
Carefully exposed

Below these white cotton sheets. Nor because our nerves,
Now slack, without tension or tone,

No longer sing like piano strings.
Nor even because our rich red blood and

Dark shining muscles
Have ceased to pump, to pulse.
As you can see, we are done with action:

All we have left is intent and desire
All we wish is for
You to feel our warmth.

Natasha Mitchell: Your work is littered with dead bodies, dead bodies, limbs, old bodies, ancient bodies, why that interest?

Ian Gibbins: For 20 years now I have been dealing with dead bodies to teach anatomy to medical students. It's a strange, sometimes bewildering experience and environment to be in and it's a very special environment and it's a very special sort of ethical and social space within which you work dealing with dead bodies.

Body Systems people -- just before we get started I'll just tell you a little bit about this environment. Most of you haven't done much if anything in the way of human anatomy before. All of the material in here, all of the human specimens they are all here because they want to be here. Here because when they were alive people made a decision to donate their mortal remains, their bodies and their body parts to you guys.

And it's something that just about in any society that I know of is normally prohibited, you normally are not allowed to do things to dead bodies other than the funeral rights and all the normal things, the rights of passage of someone dying, someone leaving their soul, their spirit that's gone and you have their mortal remains.

Natasha Mitchell: You actually co-ordinate a body donation program or part of a body donation program.

Ian Gibbins: Yes.

Natasha Mitchell: Huge responsibility.

Ian Gibbins: Yes it is. And one of the interesting little jobs of our office is answering queries from the public about the process, about what happens, what goes on, occasionally dealing with problems that occur to the rest of the family as a result of somebody's decision.

Which bit does this bit here correspond to? Where can you feel that on you?

Yes, your armpit the front part of your arm pit which has it's own proper anatomical name, the anterior axillary fold, so that's it running across there and it attaches to the clavicle there and the collar bone and off the sternum.

Neville Fields: I'm Neville Fields and I'm in third year med science at Flinders, for me the hair and the eyes and on the first body I saw they had a bandaid on the little finger and seeing the bandaid brought back all these thoughts of "this was a living person and...they died". So yes, if you can take away the personal humanistic aspect of it then it's OK but...it brings in a whole heap of emotions at the same time.

Karen: I'm Karen. I'm a third year neuroscience student at Flinders and I'm currently having a look at a foot, it looks like a woman's foot I think maybe.

Natasha Mitchell: And perhaps from a look of the toes it probably squashed into a few pointy court shoes or something.

Karen: Probably.

Natasha Mitchell: What do you feel when you're handling bits of bodies like this that have been attached to people once?

Karen: I don't really see them as people that were alive; they're just specimens in the lab so I just see them as learning tools but with the correct amount of respect that they were human beings once upon a time.

Ian Gibbins: It's always -- not a difficult experience, but it certainly sits you back a bit -- the first time you put the scalpel through the skin and peel it back and I think that feeling never goes away and certainly it's for many people the most challenged thing is doing a face dissection, not only because it's incredibly difficult but muscles of the face are incredibly complicated, very thin, very fine. But doing someone's face -- that always makes you think a bit, there's no doubt about that.

Natasha Mitchell: Yes absolutely, the eyes are the window to the soul.

Natasha Mitchell: The face is our organ of animation.

Ian Gibbins: Yes, that's absolutely true but these are de-animated. Nothing moves unless you make it move, and the eyes - because of the preservation process - don't look like real eyes.


Ashes to dust to
Tears splashing upon
Tide receding from
The edge of
Air withdrawing from
The edge of
Heat dissipating from

The still

The still.

Natasha Mitchell: We've come to a glass cabinet that's full of brains, beautiful organ that it is.

Ian Gibbins: The one in front of us here the squiggly bits we can see on either side at the top are the temporal lobes, the bits in behind our ears. Amongst other things that's what I'm using now to speak.

Natasha Mitchell: Important in language.

Ian Gibbins: Very important in language.

Natasha Mitchell: This is the organ that produces poetry, this grey porridge-like mass or rubber encased in a plastic vessel, looks sort of slightly unimpressive in front of us.

Ian Gibbins: ...it's especially unimpressive when you see it like this because it does look rubbery.

The ancients are with us still:

Light hearted
Heavy hearted
soft hearted
Broken hearted

Open hearted
Cold hearted
Empty hearted
Kind hearted
Heart of gold

Goodness of your heart
Bottom of my heart
Change of heart

Lion hearted
Stout hearted
Heart like an ox
Your heart's desire
Learnt by heart
Faint hearted
Bleeding heart
Heart and to hear
The heart of the matter

This heartland
This heart of the country
This heartbeat
This heart to heart

Ian Gibbins: The story of this one goes back to the history of anatomy and the history of medicine, even in medieval times they were still working on Galenic principles from Galen in terms of the different humours which pervade the body, and medicine and health was somehow getting the balance right between all these different humours. One of the interesting things that really appeals to me about links between language and science is that within our day-to-day language there are all sorts of historical remnants of these old ways of thinking about our body. So all these notions, all these words about the heart have absolutely nothing to do with the physiology of the heart, yet we all know what they mean and the heart is still seen as the centre of our emotional wellbeing yet we know intellectually that our emotion comes from fewer bits in our brain.

Natasha Mitchell: You've described poetry, Ian, as a sort of embodiment of knowledge but also as the art of elegant movement.

Ian Gibbins: There's a link between poetry and music, poetry sits as an intermediary between normal language and music especially songs as a subset of music. Lots of people are now thinking that music and some sort of structured sound probably preceded formal language, if you think of then poetry and music as being a motor activity.

Natasha Mitchell: Motor activity being movement.

Ian Gibbins: Being movement, yes, you're generating movement from your body and your lips and your mouth and your throat all being part of that activity. People often talk about what makes us human, there's a few things which make us human quite distinctly and one is having such a large amount of our brain associated with fine motor control of our hands. And another thing is having such a large amount of our brain controlling language.

It's relatively easy to learn movements, it's relatively easy to remember movements, think going back in time to a thought experiment before we had all this complex language. Having rhythmic sounds which have some sort of meaning associated with them, which is easy to imagine that happening, and putting them in some sort of order so that that order itself has some new meaning over and above what the actual individual sounds mean.

Natasha Mitchell: Is poetry in a sense like a sort of an economy of language in a way?

Ian Gibbins: It's an economy of language so then in an oral culture, probably most of them for a long time, how do you remember all the things you need to know? Why not try and embed it with a motor activity so that you get the rhythm, you get the rhyme which is repeating this motor activity, incorporate it with dance and now put some melody in it. So you have something else which another domain of memorability...

Natasha Mitchell: The ultimate creative mnemonic device.

Ian Gibbins: The ultimate creative mnemonic device, yes.

Natasha Mitchell: There's more than that isn't there, because we were just talking about the heart; it evokes a whole emotional response, poetry, it leaves you in a shivering, tingly state sometimes, a good piece of poetry can really hit you.

Ian Gibbins: Now why is that, what's going on there? It's some sort of coalescence of unexpected associations leading to unexpected outcomes which nevertheless for all their surprise still resonate in some sort of sense of familiarity -- even if it means I wish I'd thought of that, or I'd never have thought of that.

Now that's a common way people talk about what's good about art in general. I think it's probably something more than that and you watch a dancer do a fantastic move, or a fantastic sports person do an amazing goal or something like that in footy, or a surfer take a huge wave. You look and you think how did you do that? I could never do that, or maybe if I practised maybe I could, and I've got a feeling that something that's magic about the words -- because we all have access to language, we all have access to words -- that you sort of think wow, I wish I could have done that.

Natasha Mitchell: Mind and body, integrating them, it's all part of your work. Do you think that the mind and the brain, what do you think about that relationship, the great mind/body problem, are they the same thing?

Ian Gibbins: Simple answer -- yes.

Natasha Mitchell: Is that the poet or the neuroscientist talking?

Ian Gibbins: Oh it's both, some people say well if you get rid of the mind you dehumanise people. Absolute rubbish, it's the most amazing concept of all I think, that out of all of these cells, all of these molecules, ion channels, we get this experience. Now I have an experience, you have an experience; they're probably reasonably comparable and we can test that in all sorts of different ways.

Natasha Mitchell: Except my experience is one of being Natasha, your experience is of being Ian and trying to nail that subjective self, nailing it on the brain is a great challenge for philosophy, for neuroscience, for psychology.

Ian Gibbins: It's a challenge, to me it's a challenge to understand the mechanism of how it might be generated. But as an idea I don't find that a difficult idea at all. I find it a trivial idea, it's as trivial as waking up in the morning and finding I'm alive, I mean it's a great thing but that's the way it is. I'm not a great seeker of meaning in things. Despite all the way I do things, things are just the way they are. So I might be sort of spiritual in some sense in the sense that I appreciate all these fine ephemeral things about the world and how it works, but I don't ascribe meaning or purpose to it.

Space Invaders:

Dropping in from 12 o'clock high,
You will barely notice our arrival.
Being neither green
Nor of unduly small stature,
We blend easily
With the streetwise procession
Of Friday night diners, party goers
And good-natured drunks.

Once we are here,
Molecule by precious molecule,
We will infiltrate your haemopoetic stream,
Until your body fluids flow as thin as solar wind.
Like bamboo beneath your finger nails,
We will reduce all communication
To compromise and distant comets,
Adrift in the cloying starlight.

Already you can see the places we have been:
The sea cliffs fallen away,
Ocean currents reversed,
Corals faded to desert stone,
And cyclones following our path
Across land-locked harbours,
Over clouded mountain ranges,
To your humble fragile abodes.

But for the moment,
We are sitting unsighted
Behind the silvered glass of the Spiegeltent:
Where now are the acrobats?
The tumblers?
The flying trapeze?
Where now the sawdust?
The tattoos and scars?

For the moment, we imagine
The quiet hum of an air conditioner
Bathing us with cool relief,
Redolent with strawberries,
Raspberries, milk-sapped figs
The welcome fruits of your earth.
For the moment, as you can imagine,
We are sitting pretty.

Natasha Mitchell: You're studying the chemical messengers of the nervous system in great detail. That's all about communication -- they're the lines of communication of the body, so is poetry.

Ian Gibbins: That's exactly right and I hadn't really pulled those two things together as why I am interested in all these things until quite recently I must say, but communication is it. So here in this story of Space Invaders I was imagining people coming in, aliens coming in, infiltrating our bodies, our party, the Adelaide Festival, and causing havoc along the way, environmental destruction and having a great time at the same time with all these wonderful fresh fruits, summer fruits you have in summer.

Natasha Mitchell: What do your colleagues, your fellow scientists make of your parallel life as a poet?

Ian Gibbins: Most of them don't know about it.

Natasha Mitchell: Ian Gibbins thank you for joining me on All in the Mind this week.

Ian Gibbins: Thank you, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Natasha Mitchell: Mine too. The secret life of Ian Gibbins, poet, neuroscientist and professor of anatomy at Flinders University in Adelaide, my guest today. And all the verse and music you heard on the show was written and composed by Ian who I thank for allowing me to tag him for a day, wiring him up with microphones and my various radio paraphernalia.

Check out the audio, transcript and photos of the experience on All in the Mind's website abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind and my blog and email there too. Don't forget Andrew Denton's Enough Rope with an extraordinary doco on madness - Angels and Demons Monday night at 9.35 on ABC TV. My thanks to producer Anita Barraud and sound engineer Nick Miriesch, I'm Natasha Mitchell. Next week a day in the life of one little girl with an extremely rare brain.


Professor Ian Gibbins
Head and Professor of Anatomy and Histology
Head, Autonomic Neurotransmission Laboratory
Flinders University
Adelaide, Australia


Differential Expression of Functionally Identified and Immunohistochemically Identified K 1 Receptors on Sympathetic Neurons
Phillip Jobling, Jennifer P Messenger and Ian Gibbins
The Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 85 No. 5 May 2001, pp. 1888-1898
Most Peptide-Containing Sensory Neurons Lack Proteins for Exocytotic Release and Vesicular Transport of Glutomate
Judy Morris, Peter Konig, Toshihiko Shimizu, Phillip Jobling and Ian Gibbins
The Journal of Comparative Neurology, Volume 483 Issue 1 , Pages 1 - 142 (28 February 2005)
Heterogeneous Expression of SNAP-25 and Synaptic Vesicle Proteins by Central and Peripheral Inputs to Sympathetic Neurons
Ian Gibbins, Phillip Jobling, EE Hiok Teo, Sue Mathew and Judy L Morris
The Journal of Comparative Neurology, Volume 459 Issue 1 , Pages 1 - 111 (21 April 2003)


Niteshifter (Ian Gibbins)
Aubroco (14 Tracks)
Niteshifter (Ian Gibbins)
CD details: Unpublished, 2007. Copyright: Gibbins
Niteshifter (Ian Gibbins)
Bodyworks (10 tracks)
Niteshifter (Ian Gibbins)
CD details: Unpublished, 2007. Copyright: Gibbins

Further Information

All in the Mind Blog
Join host Natasha Mitchell in the All in the Mind blog...read and post comments at any time.
Autonomic Neurotransmission Laboratory (headed by Professor Ian Gibbins)
Centre for Neuroscience
Flinders University
Body, brain and the new science of communication; turns of phrase, figures of speech
Quicktime video of the 2007 Flinders University and Australian Book Review Annual Public Lecture, presented by Professor Ian Gibbins
14 November 2007
Diagram of Autonomic Nervous System (Britannica Online)
Autonomic Nervous System primer
This is a site for kids, but good for grown-ups too!
Cells of the nervous system
A site for kids, but good for grownups too!
Poetica on ABC Radio National: for more poetry and verse on your wireless!
Poetica is dedicated to the performance of poetry and ranges freely among contemporary Australian and overseas work as well as drawing on ancient sources and from bi-lingual programs, live readings, studio-based poetry features and on-location recordings.


Natasha Mitchell
Natasha Mitchell / Anita Barraud