by Sam Kean
60. Auburtin: Auburtin’s father-in-law—a man named Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud—had offered 500 francs for any proof of a widespread lesion in the frontal lobes without attendant loss of speech. Bouillaud eventually lost this bet, albeit under dubious circumstances. At a Société meeting in 1865, Dr. Alfred Velpeau recounted the case of a sixty-year-old wigmaker admitted to his care some years before for excessive incontinence of urine. Apparently no man had ever blathered as much as this patient did: the wigmaker talked incessantly, compulsively, prattling on even while he slept. Nothing could shut him up. He died shortly afterward, and although Velpeau hadn’t planned to examine the brain during the autopsy, he decided to do so at the last minute. Lo and behold, he found that a tumor had destroyed the man’s frontal lobes. At least that’s what Velpeau claimed. Because the wigmaker had died in 1843 and Velpeau stepped forward only a quarter century later, some people suspected him of fraud. There was a row at the Société meeting where he claimed the prize, but Bouillaud eventually paid up. (From a modern perspective, the wigmaker probably did suffer some sort of frontal lobe damage, which would have lowered his inhibitions and caused him to blather. But the frontal lobes are quite large, and quite a lot can get damaged in them without affecting Broca’s area.)
61. killed Lashley’s theory: From today’s perspective, Lashley’s ideas aren’t total bunk. Language and memory and other complex faculties do draw on multiple parts of the brain. But brain signals don’t get spirited around via electric waves; they’re carried by ions and chemicals. And saying that multiple parts of the brain contribute to something is a far cry from Lashley’s claim that all parts of the brain contribute equally.
As for Lashley’s experiments, rats could still navigate mazes after suffering brain damage because rats, the tricky bastards, have several ways of finding their way around—touch, smell, hearing, sight. Rats even have different vision centers in different parts of the brain. The lesions no doubt impaired these systems, but you’d have to knock them out completely to render a rat helpless. This is one reason why rats will still be around long after human beings have perished from the face of the earth.
62. it would start getting lost again: Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that the cat/maze/eye patch experiment wouldn’t have worked as described here, since each eye provides some input to both halves of the brain. (Again, it’s input from the left and right visual field that ends up in the right and left brain, not input from the left and right eye per se.) Sperry knew this, of course, and when he cut the cats’ corpus callosums, he also surgically rewired their optic nerves, so that the nerves provided input to one hemisphere only. As is probably obvious, Sperry was a gifted surgeon: the hand-eye coordination he developed on the playing fields of Oberlin served him well.
63. draw a picture: Forcing split-brain people to draw with their weaker hands (usually the left) produced some pretty crappy art, even by the generous standards of neuroscientific testing (see below), but it was important to isolate the abilities of the left and right brain. Interestingly, though, the left hand of split-brain people was artistically superior in some ways. That is, the lines that the left hand drew were wobbly, because of lack of practice; but overall, the lefty picture did resemble what it was supposed to, since the right brain has good spatial skills. In contrast, the lines drawn by the right hand were sure and firm—but the overall depiction looked terrible, because the left hemisphere lacks a sense of space.
Pictures drawn by someone with severe visual agnosia in the brain. (1) A tree. (2) A man. (3) A boat. Notice that the man’s eyes appear outside his head.
64. animals show subtle hemispheric differences: In contrast to most animals, nature herself is not oblivious to left-right differences, especially not on small scales. Some subatomic particles come in left- and right-handed varieties, and one of the fundamental forces of nature (the weak nuclear force) interacts with each version differently. Even more important, all known life on earth uses DNA that forms a right-handed spiral. (Point your right thumb toward the ceiling; DNA twists upward along the counterclockwise curl of your fingers.) Left-handed DNA would actually kill our cells, and yet biology textbooks can go through multiple editions showing “backward” DNA, without anyone noticing. Not that I should talk: the cover of my second book, The Violinist’s Thumb, shows a backward DNA strand, which I didn’t notice until an eagle-eyed reader pointed it out.
65. Perhaps those aren’t just metaphors: Speaking of metaphors, there’s strong evidence that whenever we hear or read an action verb (run, hit, bounce)—or even when we use certain metaphors (he swallowed his pride, she juggled two careers, it stretched our understanding)—our motor centers start humming in response. Not enough to move the body, but something’s afoot. Apparently this stimulated physical activity helps our minds, well, grasp the concept. In this and other ways, much of language is literally embodied. For more on this subject, see the book Louder Than Words, by Benjamin Bergen.
Chapter Twelve: The Man, the Myth, the Legend
66. a process in a population: If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around the idea of consciousness not being a thing in a place but a process in a population, consider this wonderful analogy from V. S. Ramachandran. In his book Phantoms in the Brain, he considers an episode of Baywatch and then asks where exactly the episode is located. On the beach where the actors were filmed? In the camera that recorded the drama? In the cables pumping bits into your television? In the television itself? (And if so, where in the television—its electronic bowels, the LCD screen?) Perhaps the show is located in the storm of photons arriving at your eyes? Perhaps in your brain itself?
After a few seconds it becomes clear that the question doesn’t make sense. Or rather, it misses the point. The real question isn’t where the episode is located but how the various pieces of technology transmit a moving picture across time and space and into your brain. Similarly, Ramachandran suspects that as we learn more about how the brain produces consciousness, we’ll care less and less about specific locations.
67. remaining cognizant: The delightfully gruesome paper “Transcranial Brain Injuries Caused by Metal Rods or Pipes Over the Past 150 Years” covers a dozen cases of people whose skulls were impaled by metal objects, and in five of the twelve, the victims didn’t black out for even a moment. Two memorable cases include a drunken bow-and-arrow game called “William Tell” and an assembly-line accident in which a twenty-six-foot metal shaft plowed most of the way through a man’s skull before getting stuck. Because he never passed out, the man could feel it sliding through his head inch by inch.
More anecdotally, during a domestic dispute in Mississippi in 2009, a woman got shot in the forehead with a .38. The bullet passed clean through her brain, front to back. And not only did she remain conscious, she remembered her manners: when a police officer knocked on her front door minutes later, he found her making tea, oblivious to her injury, and she insisted he take some.
68. to be torn out again: Clive Wearing will never recover, sadly. That said, his amnesia was most acute during the first decade after his illness, and there’s some evidence that his symptoms have abated since about the year 2000—probably due to plastic changes in his brain that allowed him to recover some function. Neuroscientists have not yet documented this improvement with proper studies, so we have to be cautious. But Wearing’s wife, Deborah, who spends more time with him than anyone else, insists that Wearing has gotten better.
For instance, Clive’s memory has improved to the point that he can have meaningful, if brief, conversations with Deborah, rather than just repeat the same things over and over. And while he still “pops awake” repeatedly, he’s gotten used to the epiphany now after millions of times, and no longer records it so zealously. He can even follow certain films a little (e.g., James Bond movies), and can be out in public without wandering off. Deborah discusses these and other improvements toward the end of her heartbreaking memoir Forever Today.
69. will never abandon h
im: There’s one seeming exception to the rule that not even amnesiacs lose their sense of self. People who suffer from so-called memory fugues do seem to forget their personal identities: they’re more like amnesiacs on television shows, who wake up not knowing anything about their past lives. But even fugue victims retain something from their past: they might be able to log on to an e-mail account, for example, because of muscle memory. And fugue victims usually do assume a new identity, since the brain apparently cannot function without a sense of self.
I’ve written up a bonus story about the most famous fugue victim in history, an American farmer named Ansel Bourne. You can read it online at http://samkean.com/dueling-notes.
70. some modern historians: The historian who deserves the most credit for revising our view of Gage—and for demonstrating that Gage might well have recovered some skills and functions later in life—is Malcolm Macmillan, author of the delightful book An Odd Kind of Fame. Everyone who cites Gage’s case should read Macmillan first—he deserves a ton of props for taking on a popular but inaccurate legend. Macmillan also suggests that Gage’s story is worth remembering because “it illustrates how easily a small stock of facts can be transformed into popular and scientific myth.” Wise words.
As long as we’re talking about inaccuracies, I should note that, obviously, I’ve had to simplify the Gage story and leave out some details. For instance, another doctor besides John Harlow did examine Gage a year after the accident—one Henry Bigelow, who provided important additional facts. I focused on Harlow’s account instead of Bigelow’s mainly because Harlow alone discusses Gage’s mental functions. See An Odd Kind of Fame for the full story.
That said, I can’t resist including some biographical details about Bigelow, who had, shall we say, a colorful youth. As one historian noted, Bigelow is remembered today as a “heavily bewhiskered surgical giant” who entered Harvard Medical School at age fifteen. But while attending Harvard, Bigelow spent most of his time “making loud noises, joining drinking clubs… and manufacturing nitrous oxide for the customary annual binges of the chemistry class.” Bigelow was finally expelled from Harvard for conducting “pistol practice in his dormitory room,” a stunt that also got him “banned from the town of Cambridge for the remainder of the year. But despite his rustication he managed to graduate on schedule.”
* This and all upcoming asterisks refer to the Notes and Miscellanea section, which can be found in the Table of Contents.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Epigraph
Part I:
Gross Anatomy
Introduction
Chapter One: The Dueling Neurosurgeons
Part II:
Cells, Senses, Circuits
Chapter Two: The Assassin’s Soup
Chapter Three: Wiring and Rewiring
Chapter Four: Facing Brain Damage
Part III:
Body and Brain
Chapter Five: The Brain’s Motor
Chapter Six: The Laughing Disease
Chapter Seven: Sex and Punishment
Part IV:
Beliefs and Delusions
Chapter Eight: The Sacred Disease
Chapter Nine: “Sleights of Mind”
Part V:
Consciousness
Chapter Ten: Honest Lying
Chapter Eleven: Left, Right, and Center
Chapter Twelve: The Man, the Myth, the Legend
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sam Kean
Works Cited
Notes and Miscellanea
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Sam Kean
Illustrations by Andrew J. Brozyna, ajbdesign.com
Author photograph by Voss Studio, Austinville, Iowa
Cover design by Will Staehle
Cover copyright © 2014 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: May 2014
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ISBN 978-0-316-24225-7
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