I think this is a brain, but it might just be a maze. This is a small icon that appears on the lower left corner of the back cover of The Mind, from the LIFE Science Library published by Time-Life Books in 1965.
The book came up in conversation recently, and for people of a certain age was one of those things you’d find in a middle-school library that would fill you with something a lot like the Kantian sublime, pre-teen edition. There was a spread of optical illusions, articles on hypnosis and brainwashing, self portraits test subjects drew while on LSD, and a selection of the gradually more and more geometric and terrifying cats painted by Louis Wain as he gradually became psychotic. For a generation of us, this was the first time we’d heard of magic mushrooms and the division between left and right hemispheres of the brain. The idea that perception was something that could be experimented with and altered – that perceiving was really a thing at all, and not just, I don’t know, existing in a universe where light was bright and heat was hot and teachers’ voices got louder the more you stared off into space wondering about how wondering happened.
From today’s perspective, it’s also interesting to look at this very stylized bit of 1960s graphic design and see it as an ancestor of computer icons. The symbol reduced to geometry.
This image came from a book in my own collection; once I spotted a copy of this for sale years and years ago, I had to have it.