A famous philosophical thought experiment: Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
At just twenty-three: Amy Harmon, “A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future,” New York Times, September 12, 2015.
Others have taken Suozzi’s path: Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the company that froze and preserved Kim Suozzi’s brain, lists on its website dozens of other clients who have had their brains or heads salvaged and maintained in a similar manner to Suozzi.
“Men ought to know that”: Hippocrates of Kos, quoted in Stanley Finger, Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
My next encounter: “Introduction to Neuroanatomy,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001.
Animals have had brains: L. L. Moroz, “On the independent origins of complex brains and neurons,” Brain, Behavior and Evolution 74 (2009): 177–190.
over 80 percent: S. Kumar and S. B. Hedges, “A molecular timescale for vertebrate evolution,” Nature 392 (1998): 917–920.
The human brain has an elastic: N. D. Leipzig and M. S. Shoichet, “The effect of substrate stiffness on adult neural stem cell behavior,” Biomaterials 30 (2009): 6867–6878.
that of Jell-O: Jennifer Hay, Complex Shear Modulus of Commercial Gelatin by Instrumented Indentation, Agilent Technologies, 2011.
A typical brain is roughly: Henry McIlwain and Herman S. Bachelard, Biochemistry and the Central Nervous System, 5th ed. (Edinburgh, UK: Churchill Livingstone, 1985).
A quarter pound of beef brain: “National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference Release 28, Entry for Raw Beef Brain,” US Department of Agriculture, March 18, 2017.
Archeological findings: J. V. Ferraro et al., “Earliest archaeological evidence of persistent hominin carnivory,” PLoS One 8 (2013): e62174.
In evolutionary terms: Craig B. Stanford and Henry T. Bunn, eds., Meat-Eating and Human Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Nonhuman carnivorous families: L. Werdelin and M. E. Lewis, “Temporal change in functional richness and evenness in the eastern African Plio-Pleistocene carnivoran guild,” PLoS One 8 (2013): e57944.
Although other carnivores: Ferraro et al., “Earliest archaeological evidence.”
Celebrity chef Mario Batali: Mario Batali, “Calves Brain Ravioli with Oxtail Ragu by Grandma Leonetta Batali,” www.mariobatali.com/recipes/calves-brain-ravioli/ (accessed March 18, 2017).
Traditional forms of the hearty: Diana Kennedy, The Cuisines of Mexico (New York: William Morrow Cookbooks, 1989).
Truly festive brain: In contrast to Christians and Jews, Muslims believe that Abraham offered Ishmael rather than Isaac as sacrifice.
Although it is a myth: Ian Crofton, A Curious History of Food and Drink (New York: Quercus, 2014).
Kuru is a disease: P. P. Liberski et al., “Kuru: Genes, cannibals and neuropathology,” Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology 71 (2012): 92–103.
“To see whole groups”: D. C. Gajdusek, Correspondence on the Discovery and Original Investigations on Kuru: Smadel-Gajdusek Correspondence, 1955–1958 (Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, 1975).
“squeezed into a pulp”: Shirley Lindenbaum, Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Even in the sixth century: Dimitra Karamanides, Pythagoras: Pioneering Mathematician and Musical Theorist of Ancient Greece, Library of Greek Philosophers (New York: Rosen Central, 2006).
Consumption of offal: Nina Edwards, Offal: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013).
A search of a popular online: Search in www.allrecipes.com for recipes containing liver, stomach, tongue, kidney (and not bean), or brain, performed March 4, 2014.
A 1990 study of food preferences: Katherine Simons, Food Preference and Compliance with Dietary Advice Among Patients of a General Practice (PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1990).
The participants’ tendency: S. Mennell, “Food and the quantum theory of taboo,” Etnofoor 4 (1991): 63–77.
Some of these cells: S. M. Sternson and D. Atasoy, “Agouti-related protein neuron circuits that regulate appetite,” Neuroendocrinology 100 (2014): 95–102.
A remarkable 1945 study: J. B. Ancel Keys, Austin Henschel, Olaf Mickelsen, and Henry L. Taylor, The Biology of Human Starvation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950).
“Hunger made the men”: D. Baker and N. Keramidas, “The psychology of hunger,” Monitor on Psychology 44 (2013): 66.
Phrenology’s founder, Franz Gall: Stanley Finger, Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
The book sold over: P. Wright, “George Combe—phrenologist, philosopher, psychologist (1788–1858),” Cortex 41 (2005): 447–451.
Noteworthies from Abraham Lincoln: William Douglas Woody and Wayne Viney, A History of Psychology: The Emergence of Science and Applications, 6th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Brains of some of Europe’s: Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
In a particularly colorful: Brian Burrell, Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).
By a curious quirk of fate: R. Schweizer, A. Wittmann, and J. Frahm, “A rare anatomical variation newly identifies the brains of C. F. Gauss and C. H. Fuchs in a collection at the University of Göttingen,” Brain 137 (2014): e269.
Wagner noted that Gauss’s sulci: Gould, The Mismeasure of Man.
We now know: M. D. Gregory et al., “Regional variations in brain gyrification are associated with general cognitive ability in humans,” Current Biology 26 (2016): 1301–1305.
The largest brain collection: Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, McLean Hospital, Harvard University, hbtrc.mclean.harvard.edu (accessed March 21, 2017).
“enhance public awareness”: George H. W. Bush, “Presidential Proclamation 6158,” 1990.
“Blueprint for Neuroscience Research,”: R. F. Robert, W. Baughman, M. Guzman, and M. F. Huerta, “The National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research,” Journal of Neuroscience 26 (2006): 10329–10331.
In 2013, both the US federal: Office of the Press Secretary, “Fact Sheet: BRAIN Initiative,” The White House, 2013; HBP-PS Consortium, The Human Brain Project: A Report to the European Commission, 2012.
Ever-increasing participation: “Annual Meeting Attendance (1971–2014),” Society for Neuroscience, www.sfn.org/Annual-Meeting/Past-and-Future-Annual-Meetings/Annual-Meeting-Attendance-Statistics/AM-Attendance-Totals-All-Years (accessed March 21, 2017).
The number of print books: G. E. Moore, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,” Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 86 (1965): 82–85.
Of the 5,070 “brain” books: Search on www.amazon.com for “science and math” books with key word “brain” (print books only), performed May 2014.
Over the same time span: Search on www.pubmed.com for US National Library of Medicine records with key word “brain” or “neuron,” performed May 2014.
Psychology is reported: Carly Stockwell, “Same As It Ever Was: Top 10 Most Popular College Majors,” USA Today, October 26, 2014.
The number of students graduating: “Table 322.10: Bachelor’s Degrees Conferred by Postsecondary Institutions, by Field of Study: Selected Years, 1970–71 Through 2014–15,” National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov (accessed March 22, 2017).
As a child: Karen W. Arenson, “Lining Up to Get a Lecture: A Class with 1,600 Students and One Popular Teacher,” New York Times, November 17, 2000.
The brain I remember best: “The Brain of Morbius,” Doctor Who, season 13, episodes 1–4, directed by Christopher Barry, British Broadcasting Corporation, January 3–24, 1976.
Even on the covers of neurology textbooks: Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell, eds., Principles of Neural Science, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton & Lange, 1991); Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2006); David E. Presti, Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Paul A. Young, Paul H. Young, and Daniel L. Tolbert, Basic Clinical Neuroscience, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer, 2015).
“It must be painful”: Arianna Huffington, “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer,” Atlantic (June 1988).
Some images of glowing brains: C. G. Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1912).
The “feminine mystique”: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).
This cultural movement: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
Freud wrote that transference: Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, translated and edited by James Strachey, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
Galen’s place in the pantheon: Penny Bailey, “Translating Galen,” Wellcome Trust Blog, blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2009/08/18/translating-galen, August 18, 2009.
Although Hippocrates of Kos: Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Galen’s vote for the brain: Gladiator games are a thing of the past, but other forms of brain injury continue to inform neurologists and neuroscientists and have led to important discoveries in modern times as well. Examples are discussed elsewhere in the book.
One famous experiment: C. G. Gross, “Galen and the squealing pig,” Neuroscientist 4 (1998): 216–221.
The rete figured prominently: Edwin Clarke and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function: Imaging the Brain from Antiquity to the Present (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1996).
“quite fail to produce”: Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, quoted in Charles J. Singer, Vesalius on the Human Brain: Introduction, Translation of Text, Translation of Descriptions of Figures, Notes to the Translations, Figures (London: Oxford University Press, 1952).
“Or is it fortune’s work”: The Poetical Works of John Dryden, edited by W. D. Christie (New York: Macmillan, 1897).
Long before Dryden: Plato, Phaedrus, translated by C. J. Rowe (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005).
“an enchanted loom”: Charles S. Sherrington, Man on His Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1940).
Sherrington’s fibrous motif: K. L. Kirkland, “High-tech brains: A history of technology-based analogies and models of nerve and brain function,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (2002): 212–223.
In his book The Engines of the Human Body: Arthur Keith, The Engines of the Human Body: Being the Substance of Christmas Lectures Given at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Christmas, 1916–1917 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1920).
Critics have objected: J. R. Searle, “Minds, brains, and programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 417–457; R. Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
One of the most memorable episodes: “Spock’s Brain,” Star Trek, season 3, episode 1, directed by Marc Daniels, CBS Television, September 20, 1968.
The robots of science fiction: Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press, 1950); The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, directed by Garth Jennings (Buena Vista Pictures, 2005).
In contrast, many of the real-life robots: M. Raibert, K. Blankespoor, G. Nelson, R. Playter, and the BigDog Team, “BigDog, the rough-terrain quadruped robot,” Proceedings of the 17th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (2008): 10822–10825; S. Colombano, F. Kirchner, D. Spenneberg, and J. Hanratty, “Exploration of planetary terrains with a legged robot as a scout adjunct to a rover,” Space 2004 Conference and Exhibit, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2004): 1–9.
Von Neumann argued: John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).
Action potentials spread spatially: R. D. Fields, “A new mechanism of nervous system plasticity: Activity-dependent myelination,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16 (2015): 756–767; Mark Carwardine, Natural History Museum Book of Animal Records (Richmond Hill, ON: Firefly Books, 2013).
Most neurons fire action potentials: A. Roxin, N. Brunel, D. Hansel, G. Mongillo, and C. van Vreeswijk, “On the distribution of firing rates in networks of cortical neurons,” Journal of Neuroscience 31 (2011): 16217–16226.
The human brain contains: Intel Skylake processors included in 2016 Apple Macbook Pro laptops, for instance, contain close to two billion transistors, about fifty times fewer than the number of neurons in a human brain.
Scientists have found a group: E. Aksay et al., “Functional dissection of circuitry in a neural integrator,” Nature Neuroscience 10 (2007): 494–504.
To make this possible: A. Borst and M. Helmstaedter, “Common circuit design in fly and mammalian motion vision,” Nature Neuroscience 18 (2015): 1067–1076.
Schultz’s group studied a task: W. Schultz, “Neuronal reward and decision signals: From theories to data,” Physiological Reviews 95 (2015): 853–951.
Remarkably, the behavior of dopamine: Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto, Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
In a further parallel: Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
The mathematical formalisms: Fred Rieke, David Warland, Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck, and William Bialek, Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
In a 2010 book: C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
The Turing machine processes: A. M. Turing, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society s2–42 (1937): 230–265.
The authors thus challenge: S. Tonegawa, X. Liu, S. Ramirez, and R. Redondo, “Memory engram cells have come of age,” Neuron 87 (2015): 918–931.
John von Neumann’s own early efforts: Norman Macrae, John von Neumann (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).
With the wave equation: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1944).
Penrose explicitly rejects: Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
The biophysicist Francis Crick: F. Crick and C. Koch, “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness,” Seminars in the Neurosciences 2 (1990): 263–275; Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (New York: Touchstone, 1994).
It is the powerful cultural vestige: Marleen Rozemond, Descartes’s Dualism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
In Descartes’s depiction: René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, translated by Stephen Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).
The ego and id: Christopher Badcock, “Freud: Fraud or Folk-Psychologist?,” Psychology Today, September 3, 2012; Saul McLeod, “Id, Ego and Superego,” SimplyPsychology, www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html, 2007.
“integrate[s] cerebral”: Bandai, “Body and Brain Connection—Xbox 360,” Amazon.com (accessed March 23, 2017).
On a February morning in 1685: Dorothy Senior, The Gay King: Charles II, His Court and Times (New York: Brentano’s, 1911).
An excess of blood: An excess of blood was known as a “plethora” in the jargon of humorism.
A fifth of the brain’s volume: Setti Rengachary and Richard Ellenbogen, eds., Principles of Neurosurgery, 2nd ed. (New York: Elsevier Mosby, 2004).
The less noticed brain cells: S. Herculano-Houzel, “The glia/neuron ratio: How it varies uniformly across brain structures and species and what that means for brain physiology and evolution,” Glia 62 (2014): 1377–1391.
This terrible disease: Gina Kolata and Lawrence K. Altman, “Weighing Hope and Reality in Kennedy’s Cancer Battle,” New York Times, August 27, 2009.
Many of these conditions: Interestingly, the structure of the US National Institutes of Health almost codifies a vestigial mind-body separation within the government’s infrastructure for neuromedicine and neuroscience research. Research into pathologies like stroke and concussion is overseen by a part of the NIH called the National Institute for Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS). NINDS is distinct from the NIH institutes that deal with more cognitive brain disorders, the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute for Drug Addiction (NIDA).
Calcium fluctuations: N. Bazargani and D. Attwell, “Astrocyte calcium signaling: The third wave,” Nature Neuroscience 19 (2016): 182–189.
My MIT colleague Mriganka Sur: J. Schummers, H. Yu, and M. Sur, “Tuned responses of astrocytes and their influence on hemodynamic signals in the visual cortex,” Science 320 (2008): 1638–1643.
Discovery of functional hyperemia: Stefano Zago, Lorenzo Lorusso, Roberta Ferrucci, and Alberto Priori, “Functional Neuroimaging: A Historical Perspective,” in Neuroimaging: Methods, edited by Peter Bright (Rijeka, Croatia: InTechOpen, 2012).
Certain drugs that act: G. Garthwaite et al., “Signaling from blood vessels to CNS axons through nitric oxide,” Journal of Neuroscience 26 (2006): 7730–7740; E. Ruusuvuori and K. Kaila, “Carbonic anhydrases and brain pH in the control of neuronal excitability,” Subcellular Biochemistry 75 (2014): 271–290.
There are also hints: C. I. Moore and R. Cao, “The hemo-neural hypothesis: On the role of blood flow in information processing,” Journal of Neurophysiology 99 (2008): 2035–2047.
Selective activation of glia: M. Hausser, “Optogenetics: The age of light,” Nature Methods 11 (2014): 1012–1014.
In one example, Ko Matsui: T. Sasaki et al., “Application of an optogenetic byway for perturbing neuronal activity via glial photostimulation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 20720–20725.
Her laboratory transplanted: X. Han et al., “Forebrain engraftment by human glial progenitor cells enhances synaptic plasticity and learning in adult mice,” Cell Stem Cell 12 (2013): 342–353.
Perhaps most obviously, neurotransmitters: Dale Purves, George J. Augustine, David Fitzpatrick, Lawrence C. Katz, Anthony-Samuel LaMantia, James O. McNamara, and S. Mark Williams, eds., Neuroscience, 2nd ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2001).
In parts of the central nervous system: John E. Dowling, The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987).
The functional effects of gliotransmitters: D. Li, C. Agulhon, E. Schmidt, M. Oheim, and N. Ropert, “New tools for investigating astrocyte-to-neuron communication,” Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience 7 (2013): 193.
In doing so, the drugs: J. O. Schenk, “The functioning neuronal transporter for dopamine: Kinetic mechanisms and effects of amphetamines, cocaine and methylphenidate,” Progress in Drug Research 59 (2002): 111–131.
Neurotransmitter diffusion also: B. Barbour and M. Hausser, “Intersynaptic diffusion of neurotransmitter,” Trends in Neuroscience 20 (1997): 377–384.
A number of studies have documented: N. Arnth-Jensen, D. Jabaudon, and M. Scanziani, “Cooperation between independent hippocampal synapses is controlled by glutamate uptake,” Nature Neuroscience 5 (2002): 325–331; P. Marcaggi and D. Attwell, “Short- and long-term depression of rat cerebellar parallel fibre synaptic transmission mediated by synaptic crosstalk,” Journal of Physiology 578 (2007): 545–550; Y. Okubo et al., “Imaging extrasynaptic glutamate dynamics in the brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 6526–6531.
Instead, both synaptic cross-talk: K. H. Taber and R. A. Hurley, “Volume transmission in the brain: Beyond the synapse,” Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 26 (2014): iv, 1–4.
Indeed, in the nervous systems: S. R. Lockery and M. B. Goodman, “The quest for action potentials in C. elegans neurons hits a plateau,” Nature Neuroscience 12 (2009): 377–378.
“every aspect of thinking”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Few things in today’s internet-dominated: Users’ comments in the online Urban Dictionary include: (1) “Refers to a couple in an ambiguous state between ‘friends’ and ‘in a relationship.’ May also be used to indicate dissatisfaction with an existing relationship.” (2) “Any relationship that’s not OK; fear of being called single; holding on to something that’s about to end; still hoping to work things out; in denial stage of separation.” (3) “[A] couple that can’t decide to be friends, friends with benefits, or to be in a full out relationship.” www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=It%27s+complicated (accessed March 25, 2017).
“the most complex object”: Christof Koch, quoted in Ira Flatow, “Decoding ‘the Most Complex Object in the Universe,’” Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, June 14, 2013.
“If our brains were”: David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).
“No computer comes close”: Alun Anderson, “Brain Work,” Economist, November 17, 2011.
“We won’t be able”: Robin Murray, quoted in Edi Stark, “The Brain Is the ‘Most Complicated Thing in the Universe,’” Stark Talk, BBC Radio Scotland, May 28, 2012.
“The human brain is”: Voltaire, quoted in Julian Cribb, “The Self-Deceiver (Homo delusus),” Chapter 9 in Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2016).
“The more complicated”: Brian Thomas, “Brain’s Complexity ‘Is Beyond Anything Imagined,’” Institute for Creation Research, discovercreation.org/blog/2013/12/20/brains-complexity-is-beyond-anything-imagined, January 17, 2011.
The legendary Indian sage Vyasa: Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God, translated by Edwin F. Bryant (New York: Penguin, 2004).
“fixed stars which almost”: Paul Lettinck, Aristotle’s Meteorology and Its Reception in the Arab World (Boston: Brill, 1999).
“By the aid of the telescope”: Galileo Galilei, The Sidereal Messenger, translated by Edward S. Carlos (London: Rivingtons, 1880).
In his original sketches: Reproduced in Stanley Finger, Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Similarly elaborate architectures: Richard Rapport, Nerve Endings: The Discovery of the Synapse (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
Catalog Aria: W. A. Mozart and L. Da Ponte, Don Giovanni (New York: Ricordi, 1986).
The ATLAS subatomic particle detector: “ATLAS Fact Sheet,” European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 2011.
The detector processes: Fortunately for the purposes of data management, most events that occur in the ATLAS detector are rejected by the detector’s triggering mechanisms, which reject all but about two hundred “interesting” events per second.
We now know that Galileo’s: M. Temming, “How Many Stars Are There in the Universe?” Sky & Telescope, July 15, 2014.
“billions and billions”: Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997).
To take on the task: S. Herculano-Houzel and R. Lent, “Isotropic fractionator: A simple, rapid method for the quantification of total cell and neuron numbers in the brain,” Journal of Neuroscience 25 (2005): 2518–2521.
Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues: F. A. Azevedo et al., “Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 513 (2009): 532–541.
By counting synapses this way: J. DeFelipe, P. Marco, I. Busturia, and A. Merchan-Perez, “Estimation of the number of synapses in the cerebral cortex: Methodological considerations,” Cerebral Cortex 9 (1999): 722–732.
This type of process indicates: Published estimates of the number of synapses per neuron vary considerably, with most sources reporting numbers in the range from one thousand to ten thousand, and some even exceeding this range.
Genes are turned on: Y. Ko et al., “Cell type-specific genes show striking and distinct patterns of spatial expression in the mouse brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 3095–3100.
Mitochondria: D. Attwell and S. B. Laughlin, “An energy budget for signaling in the grey matter of the brain,” Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow Metabolism 21 (2001): 1133–1145.
According to some estimates: B. Pakkenberg et al., “Aging and the human neocortex,” Experimental Gerontology 38 (2003): 95–99; “Table HM-20: Public Road Length, 2013, Miles by Functional System,” Office of Highway Policy Information, Federal Highway Administration, www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/hm20.cfm, October 21, 2014.
For contrast, consider the liver: E. Bianconi et al., “An estimation of the number of cells in the human body,” Annals in Human Biology 40 (2013): 463–471.
The task of mapping: Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
In one of the first published connectomics: M. Helmstaedter et al., “Connectomic reconstruction of the inner plexiform layer in the mouse retina,” Nature 500 (2013): 168–174; John E. Dowling, The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987).
Normal adult brain sizes: J. S. Allen, H. Damasio, and T. J. Grabowski, “Normal neuroanatomical variation in the human brain: an MRI-volumetric study,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 118 (2002): 341–358.
Brain volume correlates: A. W. Toga and P. M. Thompson, “Genetics of brain structure and intelligence,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 28 (2005): 1–23.
Although some of the disparities: S. Herculano-Houzel, D. J. Messeder, K. Fonseca-Azevedo, and N. A. Pantoja, “When larger brains do not have more neurons: Increased numbers of cells are compensated by decreased average cell size across mouse individuals,” Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 9 (2015): 64.
Brain volume decreases: N. C. Fox and J. M. Schott, “Imaging cerebral atrophy: Normal ageing to Alzheimer’s disease,” Lancet 363 (2004): 392–394.
In 2014, a twenty-four-year-old: F. Yu, Q. J. Jiang, X. Y. Sun, and R. W. Zhang, “A new case of complete primary cerebellar agenesis: Clinical and imaging findings in a living patient,” Brain 138 (2015): e353.
A group of surgeons: E. P. Vining et al., “Why would you remove half a brain? The outcome of 58 children after hemispherectomy—the Johns Hopkins experience: 1968 to 1996,” Pediatrics 100 (1997): 163–171.
“I have witnessed”: C. C. Abbott, “Intelligence of the crow,” Science 1 (1883): 576.
More generally, members of the corvid: N. J. Emery and N. S. Clayton, “The mentality of crows: Convergent evolution of intelligence in corvids and apes,” Science 306 (2004): 1903–1907.
“You turkey!”: Irene M. Pepperberg, Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
The punch line: A. N. Iwaniuk, K. M. Dean, and J. E. Nelson, “Interspecific allometry of the brain and brain regions in parrots (psittaciformes): Comparisons with other birds and primates,” Brain, Behavior and Evolution 65 (2005): 40–59; J. Mehlhorn, G. R. Hunt, R. D. Gray, G. Rehkamper, and O. Gunturkun, “Tool-making New Caledonian crows have large associative brain areas,” Brain, Behavior and Evolution 75 (2010): 63–70.
These animals could not: S. Olkowicz et al., “Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (2016): 7255–7260; S. Herculano-Houzel, “The remarkable, yet not extraordinary, human brain as a scaled-up primate brain and its associated cost,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, Suppl 1 (2012): 10661–10668.
Although we humans outrank: G. Roth and U. Dicke, “Evolution of the brain and intelligence,” Trends in Cognitive Science 9 (2005): 250–257.
Yet the capybara’s brain: S. Herculano-Houzel, B. Mota, and R. Lent, “Cellular scaling rules for rodent brains,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 12138–12143; J. L. Kruger, N. Patzke, K. Fuxe, N. C. Bennett, and P. R. Manger, “Nuclear organization of cholinergic, putative catecholaminergic, serotonergic and orexinergic systems in the brain of the African pygmy mouse (Mus minutoides): Organizational complexity is preserved in small brains,” Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy 44 (2012): 45–56. The number of neurons in the African pygmy mouse is not published, but an estimate of fewer than 60 million neurons in the pygmy mouse brain can be obtained by applying Herculano-Houzel and colleagues’ finding that brain size is proportional to neuron count raised to the power of 1.587 within the rodent family. Reference values of 71 million neurons and brain mass of 416 milligrams for mice were also obtained from Herculano-Houzel et al., and a brain mass of 275 milligrams was used for pygmy mice, as cited by Kruger et al.
An ant’s brain: M. A. Seid, A. Castillo, and W. T. Wcislo, “The allometry of brain miniaturization in ants,” Brain, Behavior and Evolution 77 (2011): 5–13.
“the brain of an ant is”: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871).
Some biologists propose: Harry J. Jerison, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (New York: Academic, 1973).
In fact, many neuroscientists believe: X. Jiang et al., “Principles of connectivity among morphologically defined cell types in adult neocortex,” Science 350 (2015): aac9462.
One such structure: V. B. Mountcastle, “The columnar organization of the neocortex,” Brain 120 (Part 4) (1997): 701–722.
“What I cannot create,”: “Richard Feynman’s Blackboard at Time of His Death,” Caltech Image Archive, archives-dc.library.caltech.edu (accessed March 29, 2017).
Some people have cited: Sean Hill, “Whole Brain Simulation,” in The Future of the Brain, edited by Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
The billion-dollar European initiative: HBP-PS Consortium, The Human Brain Project: A Report to the European Commission, 2012.
Related efforts in the United States: A. P. Alivisatos et al., “The brain activity map project and the challenge of functional connectomics,” Neuron 74 (2012): 970–974.
One of the few organisms: C. I. Bargmann and E. Marder, “From the connectome to brain function,” Nature Methods 10 (2013): 483–490.
Scientists today can measure: Peter Shadbolt, “Scientists Upload a Worm’s Mind into a Lego Robot,” CNN, January 21, 2015.
A car, after all: Cars can admittedly also double as media players, climate conditioners, power sources, and sleeping quarters, but these functions are for the most part dispensable.
A related attitude inspired: Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
Brain morphology was: Ralph L. Holloway, Chet C. Sherwood, Patrick R. Hof, and James K. Rilling, “Evolution of the Brain in Humans—Paleoneurology,” Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, edited by Marc D. Binder, Nobutaka Hirokawa, and Uwe Windhorst (Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2009).
Neanderthals, who originated: D. Falk et al., “The brain of LB1, Homo floresiensis,” Science 308 (2005): 242–245.
The earliest art: J. DeFelipe, “The evolution of the brain, the human nature of cortical circuits, and intellectual creativity,” Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 5 (2011): 29.
The “uncontacted” tribes: B. Holmes, “How many uncontacted tribes are there in the world?” New Scientist, August 22, 2013.
These procedures have: The 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Allen Cormack and Godfrey Hounsfield “for the development of computer assisted tomography.” The 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield “for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging.”
Over ten thousand medical: A PubMed search for “neuroimaging” returns an average of 10,039 articles per year over the five-year period spanning 2012–2016. A search for articles that include both “brain” and “imaging” returns an average of 17,270 articles per year for the same period.
In the 1990s, fMRI emerged: J. W. Belliveau et al., “Functional mapping of the human visual cortex by magnetic resonance imaging,” Science 254 (1991): 716–719; S. Ogawa et al., “Intrinsic signal changes accompanying sensory stimulation: Functional brain mapping with magnetic resonance imaging,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89 (1992): 5951–5955.
To perform an fMRI experiment: S. A. Huettel, A. W. Song, and G. McCarthy, eds., Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 3rd ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2014).
More edgy studies: S. Schleim, T. M. Spranger, S. Erk, and H. Walter, “From moral to legal judgment: The influence of normative context in lawyers and other academics,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 6 (2011): 48–57; S. M. McClure et al., “Neural correlates of behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks,” Neuron 44 (2004): 379–387.
“The influence of fMRI-based”: B. R. Rosen and R. L. Savoy, “fMRI at 20: Has it changed the world?,” NeuroImage 62 (2012): 1316–1324.
Hundreds of newspaper articles: A LexisNexis Academic search for records containing the search term “fMRI” with content type and category set to “newspapers” retrieved 1,187 hits from the time period of April 1, 2013, to March 31, 2017.
Readers get hooked: Marco Iacobini, Joshua Freedman, and Jonas Kaplan, “This Is Your Brain on Politics,” New York Times, November 11, 2007; Benedict Carey, “Watching New Love As It Sears the Brain,” New York Times, May 31, 2005.
At the same time: Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
In a much discussed 2008 article: D. P. McCabe and A. D. Castel, “Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning,” Cognition 107 (2008): 343–352.
Cognitive neuroscientists Cayce Hook and Martha Farah: C. J. Hook and M. J. Farah, “Look again: Effects of brain images and mind-brain dualism on lay evaluations of research,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25 (2013): 1397–1405.
Over the past decade: M. Kaufman, “Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds,” Washington Post, January 3, 2005.
But Davidson and his colleagues found: J. A. Brefczynski-Lewis, A. Lutz, H. S. Schaefer, D. B. Levinson, and R. J. Davidson, “Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (2007): 11483–11488.
He says he is interested: Sharon Begley, “How Thinking Can Change the Brain,” Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2007.
Davidson’s work with the meditating: D. Biello, “Searching for God in the brain,” Scientific American 18 (2007): 38–45.
In one study, Newberg’s team: A. B. Newberg, N. A. Wintering, D. Morgan, and M. R. Waldman, “The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study,” Psychiatry Research 148 (2006): 67–71.
“I don’t think faith”: V. Mabrey and R. Sherwood, “Speaking in Tongues: Alternative Voices in Faith,” ABC News, March 20, 2007.
A 2007 Scientific American article: Biello, “Searching for God in the brain.”
“A wealth of scientific studies,”: Mario Beauregard, Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
Modern brain imaging was born: The Scanner Story, directed by Michael Weigall, EMITEL Productions, 1977.
Imaging these molecules: M. M. Ter-Pogossian, M. E. Phelps, E. J. Hoffman, and N. A. Mullani, “A positron-emission transaxial tomograph for nuclear imaging (PETT),” Radiology 114 (1975): 89–98.
In one approach: A. Newberg, A. Alavi, and M. Reivich, “Determination of regional cerebral function with FDG-PET imaging in neuropsychiatric disorders,” Seminars in Nuclear Medicine 32 (2002): 13–34.
A second PET functional imaging: Michael E. Phelps, PET: Molecular Imaging and Its Biological Applications (New York: Springer, 2004).
A recent breakthrough: W. E. Klunk et al., “Imaging brain amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease with Pittsburgh Compound-B,” Annals of Neurology 55 (2004): 306–319.
Even the fastest functional PET: Peter Doggers, “Magnus Carlsen Checkmates Bill Gates in 12 Seconds,” Chess.com, chess.com/news/view/bill-gates-vs-magnus-carlsen-checkmate-in-12-seconds-8224, January 24, 2014.
In the first published fMRI study: Belliveau et al., “Functional mapping of the human visual cortex by magnetic resonance imaging.”
At about the same time: S. Ogawa, T. M. Lee, A. R. Kay, and D. W. Tank, “Brain magnetic resonance imaging with contrast dependent on blood oxygenation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87 (1990): 9868–9872; S. Ogawa et al., “Intrinsic signal changes accompanying sensory stimulation.”
Not surprisingly, limitations: N. K. Logothetis, “What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI,” Nature 453 (2008): 869–878.
Berkeley neuroimager Jack Gallant: Elizabeth Landau, “Scan a Brain, Read a Mind?,” CNN, April 12, 2014.
This usually involves expansive: William B. Penny, Karl J. Friston, John T. Ashburner, Stefan J. Kiebel, and Thomas E. Nichols, eds., Statistical Parametric Mapping: The Analysis of Functional Brain Images (New York: Academic, 2006).
Instead, functional brain maps: Modern bologna derives from the traditional northern Italian pork sausage known as mortadella. Although today’s bologna products can be made with meats other than pork, they are all highly processed and distant from their corresponding animal sources, and even more so from pigs.
A University of California: C. M. Bennett, M. B. Miller, and G. L. Wolford, “Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction,” Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results 1 (2010): 1–5.
Bennett had a difficult time: “About the Ig Nobel Prizes,” Improbable Research, www.improbable.com/ig (accessed May 4, 2017).
A second damning study: E. Vul, C. Harris, P. Winkielman, and H. Pashler, “Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4 (2009): 274–290.
The brain is like a Swiss: Nancy Kanwisher, “A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind,” TED Conferences, March 19, 2014.
Perhaps the best-known example: C. W. Domanski, “Mysterious ‘Monsieur Leborgne’: The mystery of the famous patient in the history of neuropsychology is explained,” Journal of the History of Neuroscience 22 (2013): 47–52.
“What’s important”: Kanwisher, “A Neural Portrait.”
“Critics feel that fMRI”: D. Dobbs, “Fact or phrenology?,” Scientific American 16 (2005): 24.
“One can be almost certain”: R. A. Poldrack, “Mapping mental function to brain structure: How can cognitive neuroimaging succeed?,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 5 (2010): 753–761.
Titles such as “Neural Correlates”: T. K. Inagaki and N. I. Eisenberger, “Neural correlates of giving support to a loved one,” Psychosomatic Medicine 74 (2012): 3–7; C. Lamm, C. D. Batson, and J. Decety, “The neural substrate of human empathy: Effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal,” Journal Cognitive Neuroscience 19 (2007): 42–58; K. H. Lee et al., “Neural correlates of superior intelligence: Stronger recruitment of posterior parietal cortex,” NeuroImage 29 (2006): 578–586.
Advertising expert Martin Lindstrom: Martin Lindstrom, “You Love Your iPhone. Literally,” New York Times, September 30, 2011.
He writes that “the aSTG”: Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012).
Even the Nobel Prize–winning biologist: Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (New York: Touchstone, 1994).
A key reason: Neuroskeptic, “Brain Scanning—Just the Tip of the Iceberg?,” Neuroskeptic Blog, blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/03/21/brain-scanning-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg, March 21, 2012.
By doing so, they: J. V. Haxby et al., “Distributed and overlapping representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex,” Science 293 (2001): 2425–2430.
It could even be the case: A. Shmuel, M. Augath, A. Oeltermann, and N. K. Logothetis, “Negative functional MRI response correlates with decreases in neuronal activity in monkey visual area V1,” Nature Neuroscience 9 (2006): 569–577.
famous guard dog: Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (London: George Newnes, 1894).
“Even if we could associate”: William R. Uttal, The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
In a similar vein, philosopher: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1992).
In Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove, 1954).
“Claims that computational methods”: Logothetis, “What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI.”
Some apparently specialized: N. Kanwisher and G. Yovel, “The fusiform face area: A cortical region specialized for the perception of faces,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences 361 (2006): 2109–2128.
By combining cutting-edge: M. B. Ahrens, M. B. Orger, D. N. Robson, J. M. Li, and P. J. Keller, “Whole-brain functional imaging at cellular resolution using light-sheet microscopy,” Nature Methods 10 (2013): 413–420.
Some of my own laboratory’s: B. B. Bartelle, A. Barandov, and A. Jasanoff, “Molecular fMRI,” Journal of Neuroscience 36 (2016): 4139–4148.
Your Brain Is God: Timothy Leary, Your Brain Is God (Berkeley, CA: Ronin, 2001).
“All mental functions,”: Eric R. Kandel, “Your Mind Is Nothing but Neurons, and That’s Fine,” Big Think, www.bigthink.com/videos/a-biological-basis-for-the-unconscious (accessed May 5, 2017).
“‘You’… are nothing”: Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (New York: Touchstone, 1994).
Reporting on a study: Robert Lee Hotz, “A Neuron’s Obsession Hints at Biology of Thoughts,” Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2009.
“Behind your thoughts”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993).
Wittgenstein writes: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
“By speaking about the brain’s”: Maxwell R. Bennett and Peter M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
“I feel pain,”: Daniel Dennett, “Philosophy as Naive Anthropology: Comment on Bennett and Hacker,” in Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language, edited by Maxwell Bennett et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Other philosophers of mind: Patricia Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Approximately so ended: R. S. Boyer, E. A. Rodin, T. C. Grey, and R. C. Connolly, “The skull and cervical spine radiographs of Tutankhamen: A critical appraisal,” American Journal of Neuroradiology 24 (2003): 1142–1147.
To the Egyptians: A. A. Fanous and W. T. Couldwell, “Transnasal excerebration surgery in ancient Egypt,” Journal of Neurosurgery 116 (2012): 743–748.
A group called the Brain: The Brain Preservation Foundation, www.brainpreservation.org (accessed May 5, 2017).
Another organization, called Alcor: Alcor Life Extension Foundation: The World’s Leader in Cryonics, www.alcor.com (accessed May 5, 2017).
“We are our brains,”: S. W. Bridge, “The neuropreservation option: Head first into the future,” Cryonics 16 (1995): 4–7.
Subjected to a battery of tests: K. Hussein, E. Matin, and A. G. Nerlich, “Paleopathology of the juvenile Pharaoh Tutankhamun: 90th anniversary of discovery,” Virchows Archiv 463 (2013): 475–479.
“He might be envisioned”: Z. Hawass et al., “Ancestry and pathology in King Tutankhamun’s family,” Journal of the American Medical Association 303 (2010): 638–647.
DNA evidence from the mummy: World Health Organization Communicable Diseases Cluster, “Severe falciparum malaria,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 94, Suppl 1 (2000): S1–90.
As recently as: Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).
“Schumann was always ahead”: Hans-Joachim Kreuzer, Interview by Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, “Schumann’s ‘Late Works,’” Schumann Forum 2010, henleusa.com/en/schumann-anniversary-2010/schumann-forum/the-late-works.html.
Psychiatrist Bradford Felker: B. Felker, J. J. Yazel, and D. Short, “Mortality and medical comorbidity among psychiatric patients: A review,” Psychiatric Services 47 (1996): 1356–1363.
The biology behind: Eric J. Nestler, Steven E. Hyman, David M. Holtzman, and Robert C. Malenka, Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015).
The pupil dilation: A. W. Tank and D. Lee Wong, “Peripheral and central effects of circulating catecholamines,” Comprehensive Physiology 5 (2015): 1–15.
Adrenaline and cortisol: A. Schulz and C. Vogele, “Interoception and stress,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 993.
These hormonal changes: L. M. Glynn, E. P. Davis, and C. A. Sandman, “New insights into the role of perinatal HPA-axis dysregulation in postpartum depression,” Neuropeptides 47 (2013): 363–370.
An angry man, for instance: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872).
“We feel sorry”: William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890).
In a survey of over a hundred: Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues, on the other hand, that evidence for the specificity of physiological responses to emotions is overstated. She calls into question the definitions of emotional categories themselves, arguing that emotional responses are more fluid and variable than we commonly conceive. The kind of alternative perspective she proposes “would not deny the importance of evolutionarily preserved responses, but might deny emotions any privileged status as innate neural circuits or modules” (L. F. Barrett, Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 [2006]: 28–58). See also S. D. Kreibig, “Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review,” Biological Psychiatry 84 (2010): 394–421.
A fascinating 2014 analysis: L. Nummenmaa, E. Glerean, R. Hari, and J. K. Hietanen, “Bodily maps of emotions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): 646–651.
“When a negative somatic”: Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994).
The motivation for Damasio’s: A. R. Damasio, “The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences 351 (1996): 1413–1420.
Although some critics question: B. D. Dunn, T. Dalgleish, and A. D. Lawrence, “The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (2006): 239–271.
“The opportunities for bodily”: Joseph E. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
“operates automatically”: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
The legendary violinist: In a 1978 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (27: 141–162), Myron Schonenfeld speculated that Paganini most likely experienced Marfan Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder.
“His hand was not larger”: F. Bennati, quoted in A. Pedrazzini, A. Martelli, and S. Tocco, “Niccolò Paganini: The hands of a genius,” Acta Biomedica 86 (2015): 27–31.
He designed fabulously virtuosic: Carl Guhr, Paganini’s Art of Playing the Violin: With a Treatise on Single and Double Harmonic Notes, translated by S. Novello (London: Novello & Co., 1915).
Even Carl Gauss: W. K. Bühler, Gauss: A Biographical Study (New York: Springer, 1981).
“mathematics is the product”: George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
“Our bodies and”: A. D. Wilson and S. Golonka, “Embodied cognition is not what you think it is,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 58.
Each beaver has: L. M. Gordon et al., “Dental materials: Amorphous intergranular phases control the properties of rodent tooth enamel,” Science 347 (2015): 746–750.
It is an instinct: E. N. Woodcock, Fifty Years a Hunter and a Trapper (St. Louis: A. R. Harding, 1913).
In her book Beyond the Brain: Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
This is because our environments: James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by Robert Shaw and John Bransford (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977).
“Because so many of the concepts”: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
In one example: A. Eerland, T. M. Guadalupe, and R. A. Zwaan, “Leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller: Posture-modulated estimation,” Psychological Science 22 (2011): 1511–1514.
In another demonstration: L. K. Miles, L. K. Nind, and C. N. Macrae, “Moving through time,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 222–223.
In adults over fifty: J. M. Northey, N. Cherbuin, K. L. Pumpa, D. J. Smee, and B. Rattray, “Exercise interventions for cognitive function in adults older than 50: A systematic review with meta-analysis,” British Journal of Sports Medicine (2017).
There is some evidence: E. P. Cox et al., “Relationship between physical activity and cognitive function in apparently healthy young to middle-aged adults: A systematic review,” Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 19 (2016): 616–628.
In one of the most impressive: M. Oppezzo and D. L. Schwartz, “Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40 (2014): 1142–1152.
Exercise is now known: K. Weigmann, “Why exercise is good for your brain: A closer look at the underlying mechanisms suggests that some sports, especially combined with mental activity, may be more effective than others,” EMBO Reports 15 (2014): 745–748.
“I woke up knowing”: Claire Sylvia with William Novak, A Change of Heart: A Memoir (New York: Warner Books, 1997).
A recent article: Joe Shute, “The Life-Saving Operations That Change Personalities,” Telegraph, February 6, 2015.
“Heart transplants trigger”: Will Oremus, “Personality Transplant,” Slate, March 26, 2012.
A team of Austrian researchers: B. Bunzel, B. Schmidl-Mohl, A. Grundbock, and G. Wollenek, “Does changing the heart mean changing personality? A retrospective inquiry on 47 heart transplant patients,” Quality of Life Research 1 (1992): 251–256.
Replacing the diseased organ: M. E. Olbrisch, S. M. Benedict, K. Ashe, and J. L. Levenson, “Psychological assessment and care of organ transplant patients,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 70 (2002): 771–783.
A rare before/after comparison: K. Mattarozzi, L. Cretella, M. Guarino, and A. Stracciari, “Minimal hepatic encephalopathy: Follow-up 10 years after successful liver transplantation,” Transplantation 93 (2012): 639–643.
Major components of the network: Michael D. Gershon, The Second Brain: The Scientific Basis of Gut Instinct and a Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
It turns out that: S. Fass, “Gastric Sleeve Surgery—The Expert’s Guide,” Obesity Coverage, obesitycoverage.com, April 13, 2017.
“I am bombarded”: H. Woodberries, “Personality Changes—It’s a Huge Deal!!” Gastric Sleeve Discussion Forum, gastricsleeve.com (March 10, 2012).
The prevalence of such: Jeff Seidel, “After Bariatric Surgery, the Rules of Marriage Often Change,” Seattle Times, June 1, 2011.
Bacteriotherapy methods: CDC Newsroom, “Nearly Half a Million Americans Suffered from Clostridium difficile Infections in a Single Year,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (February 25, 2015).
And recent research supports: Peter A. Smith, “Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?” New York Times, June 23, 2015; T. G. Dinan, R. M. Stilling, C. Stanton, and J. F. Cryan, “Collective unconscious: How gut microbes shape human behavior,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 63 (2015): 1–9.
In one experiment: P. Bercik et al., “The intestinal microbiota affect central levels of brain-derived neurotropic factor and behavior in mice,” Gastroenterology 141 (2011): 599–609.
In a different experiment: J. A. Bravo et al., “Ingestion of Lactobacillus strain regulates emotional behavior and central GABA receptor expression in a mouse via the vagus nerve,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 16050–16055.
Both the Collins: K. Tillisch et al., “Consumption of fermented milk product with probiotic modulates brain activity,” Gastroenterology 144 (2013): 1394–1401.
Gage was “no longer Gage,”: J. M. Harlow, “Recovery from the passage of an iron bar through the head,” Publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society 2 (1869): 327–347; A. Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio, “The Iowa Gambling Task and the somatic marker hypothesis: Some questions and answers,” Trends in Cognitive Science 9 (2005): 159–162; discussion 62–64.
Over thirty thousand people worldwide: J. Horgan, “The forgotten era of brain chips,” Scientific American 293 (2005): 66–73.
The development of optogenetics: J. Gorman, “Brain Control in a Flash of Light,” New York Times, April 21, 2014.
Blocking adenosine: W. R. Lovallo et al., “Caffeine stimulation of cortisol secretion across the waking hours in relation to caffeine intake levels,” Psychosomatic Medicine 67 (2005): 734–739; J. R. Schwartz and T. Roth, “Neurophysiology of sleep and wakefulness: Basic science and clinical implications,” Current Neuropharmacology 6 (2008): 367–378.
“Increasingly it is recognized”: Peter M. Milner, The Autonomous Brain: A Neural Theory of Attention and Learning (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999).
University College London: P. Haggard, “Human volition: Towards a neuroscience of will,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (2008): 934–946.
Part of the blame: B. Libet, C. A. Gleason, E. W. Wright, and D. K. Pearl, “Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act,” Brain 106 (Part 3) (1983): 623–642.
As neuroscientist David Eagleman: David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).
The 2015 Disney hit: Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen (Walt Disney Studios, 2015).
The resulting contradiction: Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949).
In his famous essay: Arthur Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, translated by E. F. J. Payne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
The oldest example: Fodor’s Tokyo, edited by Stephanie E. Butler (New York: Random House, 2011).
Figurines of the monkeys: Three-Monkeys, three-monkeys.info (accessed May 10, 2017).
A statuette of the monkeys: Juhi Saklani, Eyewitness Gandhi (New York: DK Publishing, 2014).
Elements of the Italian mafia: Neil Strauss, “Mafia Songs Break a Code of Silence; A Gory Italian Folk Form Attracts Fans, and Critics,” New York Times, July 22, 2002.
It is telling: The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Laurie L. Patton (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008).
By measuring electrical signals: H. B. Barlow, W. R. Levick, and M. Yoon, “Responses to single quanta of light in retinal ganglion cells of the cat,” Vision Research, Suppl 3 (1971): 87–101.
Caltech professor Markus Meister: M. Meister, R. O. Wong, D. A. Baylor, and C. J. Shatz, “Synchronous bursts of action potentials in ganglion cells of the developing mammalian retina,” Science 252 (1991): 939–943.
In one study, researchers: K. Koch et al., “How much the eye tells the brain,” Current Biology 16 (2006): 1428–1434.
Most of the auditory neurons: B. C. Moore, “Coding of sounds in the auditory system and its relevance to signal processing and coding in cochlear implants,” Otology & Neurotology 24 (2003): 243–254.
Some touch receptors: R. S. Johansson and A. B. Vallbo, “Tactile sensibility in the human hand: Relative and absolute densities of four types of mechanoreceptive units in glabrous skin,” Journal of Physiology 286 (1979): 283–300.
The olfactory receptor: Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner, and Matthew K. Nock, Psychology, 3rd ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2014).
This means that despite: T. Connelly, A. Savigner, and M. Ma, “Spontaneous and sensory-evoked activity in mouse olfactory sensory neurons with defined odorant receptors,” Journal of Neurophysiology 110 (2013): 55–62.
This much data directed: Eric Griffith, “How Fast Is Your Internet Connection… Really?” PC Magazine, June 2, 2017.
Most of the brain’s motor: E. V. Evarts, “Relation of Discharge Frequency to Conduction Velocity in Pyramidal Tract Neurons,” Journal of Neurophysiology 28 (1965): 216–228; L. Firmin et al., “Axon diameters and conduction velocities in the macaque pyramidal tract,” Journal of Neurophysiology 112 (2014): 1229–1240.
More than 40 percent: David C. Van Essen, “Organization of Visual Areas in Macaque and Human Cerebral Cortex,” in Visual Neurosciences, vol. 1, edited by Leo M. Chalupa and John S. Werner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
neural signals in the visual: N. Naue et al., “Auditory event–related response in visual cortex modulates subsequent visual responses in humans,” Journal of Neuroscience 31 (2011): 7729–7736.
For example, researchers have: C. Kayser, C. I. Petkov, and N. K. Logothetis, “Multisensory interactions in primate auditory cortex: fMRI and electrophysiology,” Hearing Research 258 (2009): 80–88.
Brain areas known for: Micah M. Murray and Mark T. Wallace, eds., The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2012).
Visual responses in frontal regions: M. T. Schmolesky et al., “Signal timing across the macaque visual system,” Journal of Neurophysiology 79 (1998): 3272–3278.
A remarkable phenomenon: M. E. Raichle et al., “A default mode of brain function,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001): 676–682.
To study brain dynamics: B. Biswal, F. Z. Yetkin, V. M. Haughton, and J. S. Hyde, “Functional connectivity in the motor cortex of resting human brain using echo-planar MRI,” Magnetic Resonance in Medicine 34 (1995): 537–541.
Such correlations are thought: K. R. Van Dijk et al., “Intrinsic functional connectivity as a tool for human connectomics: Theory, properties, and optimization,” Journal of Neurophysiology 103 (2010): 297–321.
Neurologist Maurizio Corbetta: V. Betti et al., “Natural scenes viewing alters the dynamics of functional connectivity in the human brain,” Neuron 79 (2013): 782–797.
Tamara Vanderwal of Yale: T. Vanderwal, C. Kelly, J. Eilbott, L. C. Mayes, and F. X. Castellanos, “Inscapes: A movie paradigm to improve compliance in functional magnetic resonance imaging,” NeuroImage 122 (2015): 222–232.
Another study, led by: N. Gaab, J. D. Gabrieli, and G. H. Glover, “Resting in peace or noise: Scanner background noise suppresses default-mode network,” Human Brain Mapping 29 (2008): 858–867.
Even the most banal: J. H. Kaas, “The evolution of neocortex in primates,” Progress in Brain Research 195 (2012): 91–102.
“All I could feel”: Albert Camus, The Stranger, translated by Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage, 1989).
“Meursault’s crime seems”: Matthew H. Bowker, “Meursault and Moral Freedom: The Stranger’s Unique Challenge to an Enlightenment Ideal,” in Albert Camus’s The Stranger: Critical Essays, edited by Peter Francev (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014).
In a 1994 study: A. Vrij, J. van der Steen, and L. Koppelaar, “Aggression of police officers as a function of temperature: An experiment with the fire arms training system,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 4 (1994): 365–370.
In an ambitious survey of sixty: S. M. Hsiang, M. Burke, and E. Miguel, “Quantifying the influence of climate on human conflict,” Science 341 (2013): 123567.
In one instance, the number: E. G. Cohn and J. Rotton, “Assault as a function of time and temperature: A moderator-variable time-series analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 (1997): 1322–1334.
Backing this up: L. Taylor, S. L. Watkins, H. Marshall, B. J. Dascombe, and J. Foster, “The impact of different environmental conditions on cognitive function: A focused review,” Frontiers in Physiology 6 (2015): 372.
Even untrained laboratory mice: G. Greenberg, “The effects of ambient temperature and population density on aggression in two inbred strains of mice, Mus musculus,” Behaviour 42 (1972): 119–130.
Appreciation of this phenomenon: Caroline Overy and E. M. Tansey, eds., The Recent History of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): The Transcript of a Witness Seminar, Wellcome Witnesses to Contemporary Medicine, vol. 51 (London: Queen Mary, University of London, 2014).
This finding was repeated: N. E. Rosenthal et al., “Seasonal affective disorder: A description of the syndrome and preliminary findings with light therapy,” Archives of General Psychiatry 41 (1984): 72–80; A. Magnusson, “An overview of epidemiological studies on seasonal affective disorder,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 101 (2000): 176–184; K. A. Roecklein and K. J. Rohan, “Seasonal affective disorder: An overview and update,” Psychiatry 2 (2005): 20–26.
Ambient light levels control: G. Pail et al., “Bright-light therapy in the treatment of mood disorders,” Neuropsychobiology 64 (2011): 152–162.
There are competing theories: Roecklein and Rohan, “Seasonal affective disorder.”
“Colour is a means”: Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946).
Biological studies of the effects: Michael York, The A to Z of New Age Movements (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009).
Pleasonton’s method: A. J. Pleasonton, The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky; in Developing Animal and Vegetable Life, in Arresting Disease and in Restoring Health in Acute and Chronic Disorders to Human and Domestic Animals (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1876).
A notable example: Adam Alter, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave (New York: Penguin, 2014).
He convinced a local prison: A. G. Schauss, “Tranquilizing effect of color reduces aggressive behavior and potential violence,” Orthomolecular Psychiatry 8 (1979): 218–221.
The fact that further experiments: J. E. Gilliam and D. Unruh, “The effects of Baker-Miller pink on biological, physical and cognitive behaviour,” Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine 3 (1988): 202–206.
In a rigorous study of the effects: P. Valdez and A. Mehrabian, “Effects of color on emotions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 123 (1994): 394–409.
In one example, researchers at: A. J. Elliot, M. A. Maier, A. C. Moller, R. Friedman, and J. Meinhardt, “Color and psychological functioning: The effect of red on performance attainment,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136 (2007): 154–168.
A 2009 paper published in Science: R. Mehta and R. J. Zhu, “Blue or red? Exploring the effect of color on cognitive task performances,” Science 323 (2009): 1226–1229.
Psychology researchers have defined: P. Salamé and A. D. Baddeley, “Disruption of short-term memory by unattended speech: Implications for the structure of working memory,” Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 21 (1982): 150–164; D. M. Jones and W. J. Macken, “Irrelevant tones produce an irrelevant speech effect: Implications for phonological coding in working memory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 19 (1993): 369–381.
In one example of the effect: E. M. Elliott, “The irrelevant-speech effect and children: Theoretical implications of developmental change,” Memory and Cognition 30 (2002): 478–487.
Researchers at the University of London: S. Murphy and P. Dalton, “Out of touch? Visual load induces inattentional numbness,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 42 (2016): 761–765.
In another study, scientists: S. Brodoehl, C. M. Klingner, and O. W. Witte, “Eye closure enhances dark night perceptions,” Science Reports 5 (2015): 10515.
One of the most bizarre: H. McGurk and J. MacDonald, “Hearing lips and seeing voices,” Nature 264 (1976): 746–748. The McGurk effect was first demonstrated by presenting video and auditory stimuli to a group of subjects, and then surveying them about their perceptions. You can now experience the effect yourself using video files available online.
Neuroscientists convey this distinction: M. Corbetta and G. L. Shulman, “Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (2002): 201–215.
The great William James wrote: William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890).
In bottom-up attention: R. J. Krauzlis, A. Bollimunta, F. Arcizet, and L. Wang, “Attention as an effect not a cause,” Trends in Cognitive Science 18 (2014): 457–464.
Many neuroscientists believe: Corbetta and Shulman, “Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain.”
How this happens: M. Handford, Where’s Waldo? The Complete Collection (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2008).
Research by attention expert: N. P. Bichot, A. F. Rossi, and R. Desimone, “Parallel and serial neural mechanisms for visual search in macaque area V4,” Science 308 (2005): 529–534.
Our eye motions are: H. F. Credidio, E. N. Teixeira, S. D. Reis, A. A. Moreira, and J. S. Andrade Jr., “Statistical patterns of visual search for hidden objects,” Scientific Reports 2 (2012): 920.
Our gaze jumps around: I. Mertens, H. Siegmund, and O. J. Grusser, “Gaze motor asymmetries in the perception of faces during a memory task,” Neuropsychologia 31 (1993): 989–998.
The taste of a cookie: Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann, 7 vols. (Paris, France: Gallimard, 1919–1927); Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).
The ancient historian Suetonius: Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Caesars, translated by Robert Graves (New York: Penguin, 2007).
Neuroscientist John Medina: John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Seattle: Pear, 2008).
A widely reported study: Alyson Gausby, Attention Spans, Consumer Insights, Microsoft Canada, 2015.
In 1951, a young psychologist: Solomon E. Asch, “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments,” in Groups, Leadership and Men: Research in Human Relations, edited by H. Guetzkow (Oxford, UK: Carnegie, 1951).
“That we have found”: S. E. Asch, “Opinions and social pressure,” Scientific American (November 1955).
Functional brain imaging studies have: H. C. Breiter et al., “Response and habituation of the human amygdala during visual processing of facial expression,” Neuron 17 (1996): 875–887.
A famous example is contagious: A. J. Bartholomew and E. T. Cirulli, “Individual variation in contagious yawning susceptibility is highly stable and largely unexplained by empathy or other known factors,” PLoS One 9 (2014): e91773.
Another example is the phenomenon: S. Kouider and E. Dupoux, “Subliminal speech priming,” Psychological Science 16 (2005): 617–625.
For instance, the word “cow”: S. Kouider, V. de Gardelle, S. Dehaene, E. Dupoux, and C. Pallier, “Cerebral bases of subliminal speech priming,” NeuroImage 49 (2010): 922–929.
Today, tens of thousands: Atul Gawande, “Hellhole,” New Yorker, March 30, 2009.
Prisoners in solitary confinement: Sal Rodriguez, “Solitary Confinement: FAQ,” Solitary Watch, solitarywatch.com/facts/faq, March 31, 2012.
According to the advocacy group: Sal Rodriguez, “Fact Sheet: Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement,” Solitary Watch, solitarywatch.com/facts/fact-sheets, June 4, 2011.
“All day, every day”: Shruti Ravindran, “Twilight in the Box,” Aeon, February 27, 2014.
A 1972 study: P. Gendreau, N. L. Freedman, G. J. Wilde, and G. D. Scott, “Changes in EEG alpha frequency and evoked response latency during solitary confinement,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 79 (1972): 545–549.
You may have read: Jan Harold Brunvand, ed., American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1996).
For instance, French people: Extramarital Affairs Topline, Pew Research Center, 2014.
It is extremely unlikely: R. Khan, “Genetic map of Europe; genes vary as a function of distance,” Gene Expression, May 21, 2008.
Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga: Michael Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
It is perhaps in a similar: John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel (New York: Vintage, 1999).
While President Barack Obama: Barack Obama, Remarks at the NAACP Conference, Philadelphia, 2015.
“reject the idea”: Ronald Reagan, Speech at the Republican National Convention, Platform Committee Meeting, Miami, 1968.
The cyclical nature: Marx’s view of history as a succession of class struggles is most famously set forth in The Communist Manifesto, coauthored with Friedrich Engels and published anonymously as a German edition in 1848.
In the political realm: Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; and the Communist Manifesto, translated by Martin Milligan (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988).
In the late nineteenth century: John M. O’Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1985).
In his youth, Wundt: S. Diamond, “Wundt Before Leipzig,” in Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, edited by R. W. Rieber (New York: Springer, 1980).
“In psychology,”: W. Wundt, “Principles of Physiological Psychology,” translated by S. Diamond, in Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, edited by R. W. Rieber (New York: Plenum, 1980).
Tools of the trade: K. Danziger, “The history of introspection revisited,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 241–262.
For instance, Wundt noticed: W. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. translated by J. E. Creighton and E. B. Titchener (New York: Macmillan, 1896).
According to Wundt: Wundt, Principles of Physiological Psychology.
Consideration of brain physiology: W. M. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, translated by C. H. Judd (Leipzig, Germany: W. Engelman, 1897).
“Experimental introspection is”: Edward B. Titchener, A Primer of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1899).
He was the scion: William James’s father, Henry James Sr., was a noted theologian, and his siblings included the novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James.
The hairsplitting experimental: William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890).
“Introspective Observation,”: James, The Principles of Psychology.
Their ideas spread: A. Kim, “Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University).
The teachings of psychology’s: Prominent examples included Oswald Külpe at the University of Würtzburg, G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins and then Clark University, Edward Thorndike and James Cattell at Columbia, Edwin Boring at Harvard, and Charles Spearman at University College London.
Yerkes argued that: R. M. Yerkes, “Eugenic bearing of measurements of intelligence in the United States Army,” Eugenics Review 14 (1923): 225–245.
This activism led Cattell: C. S. Gruber, “Academic freedom at Columbia University, 1917–1918: The case of James McKeen Cattell,” AAUP Bulletin 58 (1972): 297–305.
“Psychology as the behaviorist views it”: J. B. Watson, “Psychology as the behaviorist views it,” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 158–177.
Even earlier research: D. N. Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
Titchener regarded: E. B. Titchener, “On ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it,’” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 53 (1914): 1–17.
Robert Yerkes sharply: R. M. Yerkes, “Comparative psychology: A question of definitions,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 10, 1913: 580–582; J. B. Watson, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1914).
Historian Franz Samelson: F. Samelson, “Struggle for scientific authority: The reception of Watson’s behaviorism, 1913–1920,” Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981): 399–425.
Meanwhile, the patient-focused: This chapter paints the history of psychology in admittedly broad strokes and cannot give due attention to many who have played significant parts in the field. Freud in particular could merit more space than I have allotted. One might regard his emphasis on the structure of the unconscious individual mind as generally consonant with the outlook of the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth century, albeit considerably less granular and “scientific” in orientation. Academic psychologists largely rejected Freud, but a meeting point nevertheless occurred through the person of G. Stanley Hall, a student of both James and Wundt who engaged intellectually with psychological theories across the spectrum. Hall hosted Freud’s only visit to America in 1909. Hall himself also delved into such topics as paranormal psychology and the mental analysis of religious figures.
If Watson was the Moses: Michael Specter, “Drool,” New Yorker, November 24, 2014.
Pavlov most notably studied: Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
In this way: We saw examples of classical conditioning in Chapter 2, in which Schultz and colleagues paired a visual stimulus with a juice reward as part of their studies on dopamine neuron function during learning in monkeys, and where Nedergaard and colleagues paired a tone with an aversive shock to test learning ability in mice that had received transplanted human glial cells.
In a self-acknowledged: John B. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1925).
The leading spokesperson: S. J. Haggbloom et al., “The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century,” Review of General Psychology 6 (2002): 139–152.
Skinner promoted: Skinner elaborated on the phenomenon of operant conditioning most famously in his book The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938). The concept is often attributed, however, to Edward Thorndike, who explained action-based learning as arising from what he termed the Law of Effect: “Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond” (Edward L. Thorndike, Animal Intelligence [New York: Macmillan, 1911]).
Skinner viewed operant: B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953). A host of variants of operant conditioning were also introduced and studied by Skinner’s contemporaries. Examples include Edwin Guthrie’s contiguous conditioning, Edward Tolman’s latent learning, and Murray Sidman’s operant avoidance.
A student of Skinner’s: Benedict Carey, “Sidney W. Bijou, Child Psychologist, Is Dead at 100,” New York Times, July 21, 2009.
Bijou’s methods helped: D. M. Baer, M. M. Wolf, and T. R. Risley, “Some current dimensions of applied behavior analysis,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis 1 (1968): 91–97.
Offshoots of ABA: J. J. Pear, “Behaviorism in North America since Skinner: A personal perspective,” Operants Q4 (2015): 10–14.
Students would answer questions: J. Ludy and T. Benjamin, “A history of teaching machines,” American Psychologist 43 (1988): 703–712.
Writing in 1923: Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, translated by John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007).
A number of communal: B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
These settlements followed: A. Sanguinetti, “The design of intentional communities: A recycled perspective on sustainable neighborhoods,” Behavior and Social Issues 21 (2012): 5–25.
As Watson put it: Watson, Behaviorism.
“We don’t need to learn”: B. F. Skinner, quoted in Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Scribner, 2005).
“It was great for you,”: John Searle, quoted in Steven R. Postrel and Edward Feser, “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle,” Reason (February 2000).
Skinner had contended: B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957).
Chomsky scornfully dismissed: Noam Chomsky, “A review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language 35 (1959): 26–58.
Conversely, Chomsky concluded: Chomsky, “A review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.”
Psychologist Steven Pinker: Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).
Chomsky himself championed: Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
“The theory of human nature”: Pinker, The Blank Slate.
It was at this interface: M. Rescorla, “The computational theory of mind,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, n.d.).
Marr famously characterized: David Marr, Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
Captivated by such: Ned Block, “The Mind as the Software of the Brain,” in Thinking, vol. 3 of An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd ed., edited by Daniel N. Osherson et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
Neuroscience became a hot: Pinker, The Blank Slate.
With behaviorism dethroned: Notable holdouts against completely brain-centered views of mental function include those associated with the embodied cognition movement we considered in Chapter 5, as well as others who have emphasized the importance of brain-body interactions involving such phenomena as Damasio’s somatic markers or body-wide stress responses.
Some commentators: Peter B. Reiner, “The Rise of Neuroessentialism,” in Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, edited by Judy Illes and Barbara J. Sahakian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
“Many of us overtly”: A. Roskies, “Neuroethics for the new millennium,” Neuron 35 (2002): 21–23.
The world’s most notorious icon: Alex Hannaford, “The Mysterious Vanishing Brains,” Atlantic, December 2, 2014.
In another part of the brain: C. D. Chenar, “Charles Whitman Autopsy Report,” Cook Funeral Home, Austin, TX, 1966.
“In many ways Whitman”: Gary M. Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997).
When postmortem examination: Governor’s Committee and Invited Consultants, Report to the Governor, Medical Aspects, Charles J. Whitman Catastrophe, Austin, TX, 1966.
Many of Whitman’s friends: Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower.
Amygdala expert Joseph LeDoux: Joseph LeDoux, “Inside the Brain, Behind the Music, Part 5,” The Beautiful Brain Blog, thebeautifulbrain.com/2010/07/ledoux-amydaloids-crime-of-passion, July 23, 2010.
Eagleman predicts: David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” Atlantic (July/August 2011).
“Lawyers routinely order scans”: Jeffrey Rosen, “The Brain on the Stand,” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2007.
Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky: R. M. Sapolsky, “The frontal cortex and the criminal justice system,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences 359 (2004): 1787–1796.
Roughly thirty years later: Adam Voorhes and Alex Hannaford, Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2014).
“It’s a mystery worthy”: Hannaford, “The Mysterious Vanishing Brains.”
Amid widespread media: Rick Jervis and Doug Stanglin, “Mystery of Missing University of Texas Brains Solved,” USA Today, December 3, 2014.
When we strive for explanations: Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (New York: Routledge, 2003).
“Youth is hot”: William Shakespeare, “The Passionate Pilgrim,” in The Complete Works, edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Books, 2002).
“Regions within the limbic system”: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, “The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain,” TED Conferences, September 17, 2012.
We might also note: Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Who Lives Longest?” New York Times Magazine, March 19, 2013.
Stressing the centrality: “The Science of Drug Abuse and Addiction: The Basics,” National Institute of Drug Abuse, drugabuse.gov/publications/media-guide/science-drug-abuse-addiction-basics (accessed June 7, 2017).
Part of NIDA’s objective: A. I. Leshner, “Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters,” Science 278 (1997): 45–47.
External social and environmental variables: J. D. Hawkins, R. F. Catalano, and J. Y. Miller, “Risk and protective factors for alcohol and other drug problems in adolescence and early adulthood: Implications for substance abuse prevention,” Psychological Bulletin 112 (1992): 64–105; Mayo Clinic Staff, “Drug Addiction: Risk Factors,” Mayo Clinic, mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/drug-addiction/basics/risk-factors/con-20020970 (accessed June 7, 2017).
Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld argue: Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
He writes that “addictive acts”: Lance Dodes, “Is Addiction Really a Disease?” Psychology Today, December 17, 2011.
The hero of Mel Brooks’s: Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, 20th Century Fox, 1974.
Science writer Brian Burrell: Brian Burrell, Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).
Modern researchers apply: Nancy C. Andreasen, “Secrets of the Creative Brain,” Atlantic (July/August 2014).
According to studies of creativity: M. Reznikoff, G. Domino, C. Bridges, and M. Honeyman, “Creative abilities in identical and fraternal twins,” Behavioral Genetics 3 (1973): 365–377; A. A. Vinkhuyzen, S. van der Sluis, D. Posthuma, and D. I. Boomsma, “The heritability of aptitude and exceptional talent across different domains in adolescents and young adults,” Behavioral Genetics 39 (2009): 380–392; C. Kandler et al., “The nature of creativity: The roles of genetic factors, personality traits, cognitive abilities, and environmental sources,” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 111 (2016): 230–249.
Psychologist Kevin Dunbar: Kevin Dunbar, “How Scientists Think: On-line Creativity and Conceptual Change in Science,” in Creative Thought: An Investigation of Conceptual Structures and Processes, edited by Thomas B. Ward, Steven M. Smith, and Jyotsna Vaid (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1997).
“A change in perspective”: Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (New York: Viking, 2013).
In 1819 Franz Gall: Jan Verplaetse, Localising the Moral Sense: Neuroscience and the Search for the Cerebral Seat of Morality, 1800–1930 (New York: Springer, 2009).
Reflecting a more recent view: L. Pascual, P. Rodrigues, and D. Gallardo-Pujol, “How does morality work in the brain? A functional and structural perspective of moral behavior,” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 7 (2013): 65.
This was stunningly: S. Milgram, “Behavioral study of obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 371–378.
Psychologist Joshua Greene: Lauren Cassani Davis, “Do Emotions and Morality mix?” Atlantic, February 5, 2016.
The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle: Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: James Fraser, 1841).
It is a picture that: William James, “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,” Atlantic Monthly (October 1880).
“Schizophrenia is a disease”: K. Weir, “The roots of mental illness,” Monitor on Psychology 43 (2012): 30.
There is evidence: G. Schomerus et al., “Evolution of public attitudes about mental illness: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 125 (2012): 440–452.
According to the French social theorist: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
“To encourage the influence”: Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat, an Institution near York, for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends: Containing an Account of Its Origins and Progress, the Modes of Treatment, and a Statement of Cases (York, UK: Isaac Peirce, 1813).
According to Foucault’s analysis: Foucault, Madness and Civilization.
According to statistics: “Mental Health Facts in America,” National Alliance on Mental Illness, 2015, nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-By-the-Numbers.
On July 23, 2012: Doug Stanglin, “Aurora Suspect James Holmes Sent His Doctor Burned Money,” USA Today, December 10, 2012.
And instead of using: James Holmes, Laboratory Notebook, University of Colorado, 2012.
After his arrest: Ann O’Neill, Ana Cabrera, and Sara Weisfeldt, “A Look Inside the ‘Broken’ Mind of James Holmes,” CNN, June 10, 2017.
Since his teen years: Ann O’Neill and Sara Weisfeldt, “Psychiatrist: Holmes Thought 3–4 Times a Day About Killing,” CNN, June 10, 2017.
For a more balanced perspective: Jack Bragen, Schizophrenia: My 35-Year Battle (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2015).
“In order to take medications,”: Jack Bragen, “On Mental Illness: The Sacrifices of Being Medicated,” Berkeley Daily Planet, May 11, 2011.
Self-stigmatizing is: P. W. Corrigan, J. E. Larson, and N. Rusch, “Self-stigma and the ‘why try’ effect: Impact on life goals and evidence-based practices,” World Psychiatry 8 (2009): 75–81.
A large international analysis: Schomerus et al., “Evolution of public attitudes about mental illness: A systematic review and meta-analysis.”
He and his collaborator: P. W. Corrigan and A. C. Watson, “At issue: Stop the stigma: Call mental illness a brain disease,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 30 (2004): 477–479.
The twentieth century saw: P. R. Reilly, “Eugenics and involuntary sterilization: 1907–2015,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 16 (2015): 351–368.
A notorious example: Dana Goldstein, “Sterilization’s Cruel Inheritance,” New Republic, March 4, 2016.
In upholding the decision: Carrie Buck v. John Hendren Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
An unusual burial ceremony: J. Pfeiffer, “Neuropathology in the Third Reich,” Brain Pathology 1 (1991): 125–131.
These specimens embodied: Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Among those who benefitted: J. T. Hughes, “Neuropathology in Germany during World War II: Julius Hallervorden (1882–1965) and the Nazi programme of ‘euthanasia,’” Journal of Medical Biography 15 (2007): 116–122.
Hallervorden was reputed: J. Pfeiffer, “Phases in the postwar German Reception of the ‘euthanasia program’ (1939–1945) involving the killing of the mentally disabled and its exploitation by neuroscientists,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 15 (2006): 210–244.
That Hallervorden’s brain samples: R. Ahren, “German Institute Finds Brain Parts Used by Nazis for Research During, and After, WWII,” Times of Israel, August 31, 2016.
This reflex: Roy Porter, “Madness and Its Institutions,” in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, edited by Andrew Wear (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Stately neoclassical or gothic: Mark Davis, Asylum: Inside the Pauper Lunatic Asylums (Stroud, UK: Amberley, 2014).
But many treatment practices: H. R. Rollin, “Psychiatry in Britain one hundred years ago,” British Journal of Psychiatry 183 (2003): 292–298.
A haunting 1869 photograph: Chris Pleasance, “Faces from the Asylum: Harrowing Portraits of Patients at Victorian ‘Lunatic’ Hospital Where They Were Treated for ‘Mania, Melancholia and General Paralysis of the Insane,’” Daily Mail, March 18, 2015.
To modern eyes: Ezra Susser, Sharon Schwartz, Alfredo Morabia, and Evelyn J. Bromet, eds., Psychiatric Epidemiology: Searching for the Causes of Mental Disorders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Whereas most mental patients: W. S. Bainbridge, “Religious insanity in America: The official nineteenth-century theory,” Sociological Analysis 45 (1984).
The most devastating condition: G. Davis, “The most deadly disease of asylumdom: General paralysis of the insane and Scottish psychiatry, c. 1840–1940,” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 42 (2012): 266–273.
In an 1826 report: J. M. S. Pearce, “Brain disease leading to mental illness: A concept initiated by the discovery of general paralysis of the insane,” European Neurology 67 (2012): 272–278.
By one account: J. Hurn, “The changing fortunes of the general paralytic,” Wellcome History 4 (1997): 5.
On the Continent: Pellagra and Its Prevention and Control in Major Emergencies, World Health Organization, 2000.
One of the worst outbreaks: Charles S. Bryan, Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014).
A Hungarian-American epidemiologist: V. P. Sydenstricker, “The history of pellagra, its recognition as a disorder of nutrition and its conquest,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 6 (1958): 409–414.
This is a brand of complexity: Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
Correlating mental illnesses: Stephen V. Faraone, Stephen J. Glatt, and Ming T. Tsuang, “Genetic Epidemiology,” in Textbook of Psychiatric Epidemiology, edited by Ming T. Tsuang, Mauricio Tohen, and Peter B. Jones (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
If a person with a mental: R. Plomin, M. J. Owen, and P. McGuffin, “The genetic basis of complex human behaviors,” Science 264 (1994): 1733–1739.
For instance, in studies: Judith Allardyce and Jim van Os, “Examining Gene-Environment Interplay in Psychiatric Disorders,” in Tsuang, Tohen, and Jones, eds., Textbook of Psychiatric Epidemiology.
Using approaches like these: M. Burmeister, M. G. McInnis, and S. Zollner, “Psychiatric genetics: Progress amid controversy,” Nature Reviews Genetics 9 (2008): 527–540.
Based on reputable data: P. F. Sullivan, M. J. Daly, and M. O’Donovan, “Genetic architectures of psychiatric disorders: The emerging picture and its implications,” Nature Reviews Genetics 13 (2012): 537–551.
Genes that correlate: Supporting this point, a large 2014 study (F. A. Wright et al., “Heritability and genomics of gene expression in peripheral blood,” Nature Genetics 46 [2014]: 430–437) found that about 70 percent of genes implicated in heritable autism spectrum disorders or mental retardation were associated with gene expression changes that could be detected in blood, a possible extracerebral source of physiological effects on mental function. A 2013 review of studies on the relationship between obesity and depression in adolescents (D. Nemiary et al., “The relationship between obesity and depression among adolescents,” Psychiatric Annual 42 [2013]: 305–308), for instance, reports that obese adolescents are more likely than others to experience school and mental health problems, and that teasing and body dissatisfaction are both likely to be significant contributing factors. Because obesity in turn is linked to genetic causes, the obesity-depression relationship provides an illustration of how genes may influence the brain and mind through indirect means.
For instance, traumatic brain: M. Schwarzbold et al., “Psychiatric disorders and traumatic brain injury,” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 4 (2008): 797–816.
One such scholar: Ruth Shonle Cavan, Suicide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928).
A young graduate student: J. Faris, “Robert E. Lee Faris and the discipline of sociology,” ASA Footnotes 26 (1998): 8.
These data revealed: Robert E. L. Faris and H. Warren Dunham, Mental Disorders in Urban Areas: An Ecological Study of Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
Toward the middle of the century: A. V. Horwitz and G. N. Grob, “The checkered history of American psychiatric epidemiology,” Milbank Quarterly 89 (2011): 628–657.
Faris and Dunham were criticized: J. D. Page, “Review of Mental Disorders in Urban Areas,” Journal of Educational Psychology 30 (1939): 706–708.
But subsequent studies: W. W. Eaton, “Residence, social class, and schizophrenia,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 15 (1974): 289–299.
Although some hypothesized: Monica Charalambides, Craig Morgan, and Robin M. Murray, “Epidemiology of Migration and Serious Mental Illness: The Example of Migrants to Europe,” in Tsuang, Tohen, and Jones, eds., Textbook of Psychiatric Epidemiology; G. Lewis, A. David, S. Andreasson, and P. Allebeck, “Schizophrenia and city life,” Lancet 340 (1992): 137–140; M. Marcelis, F. Navarro-Mateu, R. Murray, J. P. Selten, and J. van Os, “Urbanization and psychosis: A study of 1942–1978 birth cohorts in the Netherlands,” Psychological Medicine 28 (1998): 871–879.
Epidemiologists have found: William W. Eaton, Chuan-Yu Chen, and Evelyn J. Bromet, “Epidemiology of Schizophrenia,” in Tsuang, Tohen, and Jones, eds., Textbook of Psychiatric Epidemiology.
Major depression, meanwhile: D. S. Hasin, M. C. Fenton, and M. M. Weissman, “Epidemiology of Depressive Disorders,” in Tsuang, Tohen, and Jones, eds., Textbook of Psychiatric Epidemiology.
Bipolar disorder, which shares: Kathleen R. Merikangas and Mauricio Tohen, “Epidemiology of Bipolar Disorder in Adults and Children,” in Tsuang, Tohen, and Jones, eds., Textbook of Psychiatric Epidemiology.
The writer Elie Wiesel: Elie Wiesel, A Mad Desire to Dance, translated by Catherine Temerson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
In Sylvia Plath’s: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber, 1966).
Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, translated by Oliver Ready (New York: Penguin, 2014).
Most famously, Shakespeare’s: Wandering crazed on the stormy heath in Act III, Scene 2, Lear seems to invite explicit mental torment from the elements: “That have with two pernicious daughters join’d / Your high engender’d battles ’gainst a head / So old and white as this.”
On July 7, 1970: “The Trial of Natalya Gorbanevskaya,” A Chronicle of Current Events, August 31, 1970.
Now she was accused: The Editors, “Voices from the Past: The Trial of Gleb Pavlovsky,” translated by J. Crowfoot, A Chronicle of Events, December 31, 1982.
She was at that time: “The Arrest of Natalya Gorbanevskaya,” A Chronicle of Current Events, December 31, 1969.
Experts at the Serbsky: “The Trial of Natalya Gorbanevskaya.”
Sluggish schizophrenia: H. Merskey and B. Shafran, “Political hazards in the diagnosis of ‘sluggish schizophrenia,’” British Journal of Psychiatry 148 (1986): 247–256.
“If my daughter”: “The Trial of Natalya Gorbanevskaya.”
Gorbanevskaya served two years: Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Russia’s Political Hospitals: The Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union (London: Futura, 1978).
She was released in 1972: Douglas Martin, “Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Soviet Dissident and Poet, Dies at 77,” New York Times, December 1, 2013.
The popular folksinger: R. Apps, G. Moore, and S. Guppy, “Natalia,” in Joan Baez: From Every Stage (A & M Records, 1976).
The practice of politically motivated: R. van Voren, “Political abuse of psychiatry—An historical overview,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 36 (2010): 33–35.
A Russian émigré: Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
In a New York Times piece: Walter Reich, “The World of Soviet Psychiatry,” New York Times, January 30, 1983.
Where once such standards: F. Jabr, “The newest edition of psychiatry’s ‘Bible,’ the DSM-5, is complete,” Scientific American, January 28, 2013.
In its fifth and latest edition: The People Behind DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.
The criteria continue: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, 5th ed. (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
The shifting of disease categories: A. Suris, R. Holliday, and C. S. North, “The evolution of the classification of psychiatric disorders,” Behavioral Science 6 (2016): 5.
By looking around the globe: Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us (New York: Free Press, 2010).
Watters notes that cross-cultural: Ethan Watters, “The Americanization of Mental Illness,” New York Times Magazine, January 8, 2010.
Szasz explained: T. Szasz, “The myth of mental illness,” American Psychology 15 (1960): 113–118.
Szasz earned notoriety: J. Oliver, “The myth of Thomas Szasz,” New Atlantis (Summer 2006); Benedict Carey, “Dr. Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field, Dies at 92,” New York Times, September 11, 2012.
These could include so-called: A. L. Petraglia, E. A. Winkler, and J. E. Bailes, “Stuck at the bench: Potential natural neuroprotective compounds for concussion,” Surgical Neurology International 2 (2011): 146.
Alternatively, if we chose: Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, translated by Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
Two poles of the debate: G. L. Engel, “The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine,” Science 196 (1977): 129–136.
Engel was not neutral: T. M. Brown, “George Engel and Rochester’s Biopsychosocial Tradition: Historical and Developmental Perspectives,” in The Biopsychosocial Approach: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Richard M. Frankel, Timothy E. Quill, and Susan H. McDaniel (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003).
Doing this, he wrote: Engel, “The need for a new medical model.”
The contrast between: “Mental Health Treatment & Services,” National Alliance on Mental Illness, nami.org/Learn-More/Treatment (accessed June 13, 2017).
Examples include psychoanalytic: Oliver Burkeman, “Therapy Wars: The Revenge of Freud,” Guardian, January 7, 2016.
Many drugs target: J. R. Cooper, F. E. Bloom, and R. H. Roth, The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Other psychotherapeutic drugs: G. S. Malhi and T. Outhred, “Therapeutic mechanisms of lithium in bipolar disorder: Recent advances and current understanding,” CNS Drugs 30 (2016): 931–949.
A widely cited report: America’s State of Mind, Medco Health Solutions, 2011.
A similar study in England: S. Ilyas and J. Moncrieff, “Trends in prescriptions and costs of drugs for mental disorders in England, 1998–2010,” British Journal of Psychiatry 200 (2012): 393–398.
Meanwhile, a study: M. Olfson and S. C. Marcus, “National trends in outpatient psychotherapy,” American Journal of Psychiatry 167 (2010): 1456–1463.
The same surveys: Schomerus et al., “Evolution of public attitudes about mental illness: A systematic review and meta-analysis.”
They write that “the brain-disease”: S. Satel and S. O. Lilienfeld, “Addiction and the brain-disease fallacy,” Frontiers in Psychiatry 4 (2013): 141.
He says that patients: Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010).
“The biological/psychosocial treatment”: A. Prosser, B. Helfer, and S. Leucht, “Biological v. psychosocial treatments: A myth about pharmacotherapy v. psychotherapy,” British Journal of Psychiatry 208 (2016): 309–311.
“Instead of arguing”: Corrigan and Watson, “At issue: Stop the stigma.”
“Technology can cover”: Antonio Regalado, “Why America’s Top Mental Health Researcher Joined Alphabet,” Technology Review, September 21, 2015.
He suggests in particular: The Google division Insel joined was subsequently spun off as the health sciences company Verily. Insel left Verily in 2017 and cofounded a company called Mindstrong, which also aims to use information technology, with the aid of smartphones, to diagnose and monitor mental illnesses.
Psychologists Adrian Ward: A. F. Ward and P. Valdesolo, “What internet habits say about mental health,” Scientific American, August 14, 2012.
Before there was Kal-El: Whitney Ellsworth, Robert J. Maxwell, and Bernard Luber, Adventures of Superman, Warner Bros. Television, September 19, 1952; Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, The Reign of the Superman, January 1933.
Two years later: Deborah Friedell, “Kryptonomics,” New Yorker, June 24, 2013.
Among the wonders: P. Frati et al., “Smart drugs and synthetic androgens for cognitive and physical enhancement: Revolving doors of cosmetic neurology,” Current Neuropharmacology 13 (2015): 5–11; K. Smith, “Brain decoding: Reading minds,” Nature 502 (2013): 428–430; E. Dayan, N. Censor, E. R. Buch, M. Sandrini, and L. G. Cohen, “Noninvasive brain stimulation: From physiology to network dynamics and back,” Nature Neuroscience 16 (2013): 838–844; K. S. Bosley et al., “CRISPR germline engineering—The community speaks,” Nature Biotechnology 33 (2015): 478–486.
Perhaps nothing: Over two thousand newspaper stories and combined paper hits between December 25, 2011, and December 25, 2016, were retrieved from a LexisNexis Academic search performed using search terms “hacking” and “brain”—an average of more than four hundred publications per year during this period.
In a 2015 Atlantic: Maria Konnikova, “Hacking the Brain,” Atlantic (June 2015).
Numerous talks: Andres Lozano, “Can Hacking the Brain Make You Healthier?” TED Radio Hour, National Public Radio, August 9, 2013; Keith Barry, “Brain Magic,” TED Conferences, July 21, 2008.
The tone of these: Greg Gage, Miguel Nicolelis, Tan Le, David Eagleman, Andres Lozano, and Todd Kuiken, “Tech That Can Hack Your Brain,” TED Playlist (6 talks), ted.com/playlists/392/tech_that_can_hack_your_brain (accessed August 1, 2017).
MIT is also famous for: T. F. Peterson, Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
The most infamous: G. A. Mashour, E. E. Walker, and R. L. Martuza, “Psychosurgery: Past, present, and future,” Brain Research: Brain Research Reviews 48 (2005): 409–419.
In one variant: B. M. Collins and H. J. Stam, “Freeman’s transorbital lobotomy as an anomaly: A material culture examination of surgical instruments and operative spaces,” History of Psychology 18 (2015): 119–131.
Approximately 5 percent: T. Hilchy. “Dr. James Watts, U.S. Pioneer in Use of Lobotomy, Dies at 90,” New York Times, November 10, 1994; W. Freeman, “Lobotomy and epilepsy: A study of 1000 patients,” Neurology 3 (1953): 479–494.
Lobotomies were nevertheless: G. J. Young et al., “Evita’s lobotomy,” Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 22 (2015): 1883–1888.
Most famous was the case: Suzanne Corkin, Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H. M. (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
A technique called: H. Shen, “Neuroscience: Tuning the brain,” Nature 507 (2014): 290–292; Michael S. Okun and Pamela R. Zeilman, Parkinson’s Disease: Guide to Deep Brain Stimulation Therapy, National Parkinson Foundation, 2014.
The resulting information: A. S. Widge et al., “Treating refractory mental illness with closed-loop brain stimulation: Progress towards a patient-specific transdiagnostic approach,” Experimental Neurology 287 (2017): 461–472.
Brain recordings can: M. A. Lebedev and M. A. Nicolelis, “Brain-machine interfaces: From basic science to neuroprostheses and neurorehabilitation,” Physiological Reviews 97 (2017): 767–837.
In an amazing demonstration: Benedict Carey, “Paralyzed, Moving a Robot with Their Minds,” New York Times, May 16, 2012.
Controlling a mechanical: M. K. Manning and A. Irvine, The DC Comics Encyclopedia (New York: DK Publishing, 2016).
In one example, researchers: R. P. Rao et al., “A direct brain-to-brain interface in humans,” PLoS One 9 (2014): e111332.
Attaching the EEG: “The Menagerie,” directed by Marc Daniels and Robert Butler, Star Trek, season 1, episodes 11 and 12, CBS Television, November 17–24, 1966.
In another well-publicized case: K. N. Kay, T. Naselaris, R. J. Prenger, and J. L. Gallant, “Identifying natural images from human brain activity,” Nature 452 (2008): 352–355.
“Like computers, human brains”: Tanya Lewis, “How Human Brains Could Be Hacked,” LiveScience Blog, livescience.com /37938-how-human-brain-could-be-hacked.html, July 3, 2013.
“Twenty years from now”: Raymond Kurzweil, “Get Ready for Hybrid Thinking,” TED Conferences, June 14, 2017.
Kurzweil believes that: Raymond Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005).
Taking a similar tack: Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (New York: Anchor Books, 2014).
The Defense Advanced Research: Biological Technologies Office, “DARPA-BAA-16-33,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 2016.
“We can now see”: Abby Phillip, “A Paralyzed Woman Flew an F-35 Fighter Jet in a Simulator—Using Only Her Mind,” Washington Post, March 3, 2015.
Even noninvasive brain: Vanessa Barbara, “Woodpecker to Fix My Brain,” New York Times, September 27, 2015.
The US presidential election: John Oliver, “Third Parties,” Last Week Tonight, HBO, October 16, 2016.
As the founder: Zoltan Istvan, “Should a Transhumanist Run for US President?” Huffington Post, October 8, 2014.
“Who doesn’t want”: “Zoltan Istvan and Steve Fuller,” Brain Bar Budapest Conference, brainbar.com, June 2, 2016.
The Transhumanist Party: A. Roussi, “Now This Is an ‘Outsider Candidate’: Zoltan Istvan, a Transhumanist Running for President, Wants to Make You Immortal,” Salon, February 19, 2016.
The aspiring politician: Zoltan Istvan, The Transhumanist Wager (Reno, NV: Futurity Imagine Media, 2013).
The transhumanist muse: Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (Las Vegas: New Falcon Publications, 1983).
The translation of neuroscience: D. Martin, “Futurist Known as FM-2030 Is Dead at 69,” New York Times, July 11, 2000.
In the imaginations: The Matrix, directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, Warner Bros., 1999; “Q Who,” directed by Rob Bowman, Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 2, episode 16, CBS Television, May 8, 1989.
Nanobots would be small: Kevin Shapiro, “This Is Your Brain on Nanobots,” Commentary Magazine, December 1, 2005.
Although some nanotechnology experts: A. Moscatelli, “The struggle for control,” Nature Nanotechnology 8 (2013): 888–890; C. Toumey, “Nanobots today,” Nature Nanotechnology 8 (2013): 475–476.
Even Nicholas Negroponte: Nicholas Negroponte, “Nanobots in Your Brain Could Be the Future of Learning,” Big Think, bigthink.org/videos/nicholas-negroponte-on-the-future-of-biotech, December 13, 2014.
A digital video series: H+: The Digital Series, directed by Stewart Hendler, youtube.com/user/HplusDigitalSeries, August 8, 2012.
“The upload is”: Natasha Vita-More, quoted in Kevin Holmes, “Talking to the Future Humans: Natasha Vita-More,” Vice, October 11, 2011, vice.com/en_us/article/mvpeyq/talking-to-the-future-humans-natasha-vita-more-interview-sex.
To achieve the uploading: Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
In Chapter 5: Price as of June 15, 2017, listed on www.alcor.org.
Alcor is run by: C. Michallon, “British ‘Futurist’ Who Runs Cryogenics Facility Says He Plans to Freeze Just His Brain—and Insists His body Is ‘Replaceable,’” Daily Mail, December 26, 2016.
One of Alcor’s early clients: F. Chamberlain, “A tribute to FM-2030,” Cryonics 21 (2000): 10–14.
His frozen head: The Alcor facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, is also where Kim Suozzi’s remains are stored.
“Even in cases”: Laura Y. Cabrera, Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
In the arena: T. Friend, “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever,” New Yorker, April 3, 2017.
The historian of science: Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Among today’s humans: R. Lynn and M. V. Court, “New evidence of dysgenic fertility for intelligence in the United States,” Intelligence 32 (2004): 193–201.
Beetles, for instance: O. Béthoux, “The earliest beetle identified,” Journal of Paleontology 83 (2009): 931–937; N. E. Stork, J. McBroom, C. Gely, and A. J. Hamilton, “New approaches narrow global species estimates for beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112 (2015): 7519–7523.
The great biologist: “Beetlemania,” Economist, March 18, 2015.
The approach seems: S. W. Bridge, “The neuropreservation option: Head first into the future,” Cryonics 16 (1995): 4–7.
“Most of the benefits”: Nick Bostrom, “Superintelligence,” BookTV Lecture, C-SPAN, September 12, 2014. Bostrom’s estimate of visual data transmission to the brain is considerably larger than the figure I presented in Chapter 6, but it’s perhaps based on a quantification of input to the retina rather than retinal output to the brain. The retina contains about a hundred million photoreceptors that detect light from the environment, but this information is compressed dramatically before it leaves the eye. What the brain actually “sees” are the spikes carried by roughly a million ganglion cells per retina, which constitute retinal output only and were the basis for the estimate I cited of ten megabytes per second per eye.
Over four thousand years: Yoshihide Igarashi, Tom Altman, Mariko Funada, and Barbara Kamiyama, Computing: A Historical and Technical Perspective (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2014).
The greatest cognitive aid: Christopher Woods, ed., Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Philosopher Andy Clark: Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
The mind and self: A. Clark and D. J. Chalmers, “The extended mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 10–23.
Speaking personally: In the 2014 US Supreme Court case Riley v. California, the court decided that it is unconstitutional to search the contents of a modern cell phone without a warrant. Writing for a unanimous majority, Chief Justice John Roberts described smartphones as “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”
A different form of cognitive: Bostonians are proverbially undisciplined drivers.
In this case: Tim Adams, “Self-Driving Cars: From 2020 You Will Become a Permanent Backseat Driver,” Guardian, September 13, 2015.
In 1968: G. S. Brindley and W. S. Lewin, “The sensations produced by electrical stimulation of the visual cortex,” Journal of Physiology 196 (1968): 479–493.
In the ensuing years: M. Abrahams, “A Stiff Test for the History Books,” Guardian, March 16, 2009.
Meanwhile, Brindley’s idea: D. Ghezzi, “Retinal prostheses: Progress toward the next generation implants,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 9 (2015): 290.
Using a technique: M. S. Gart, J. M. Souza, and G. A. Dumanian, “Targeted muscle reinnervation in the upper extremity amputee: A technical roadmap,” Journal of Hand Surgery (American Volume) 40 (2015): 1877–1888.
In 2015, a fifty-nine-year-old man: E. Cott, “Prosthetic Limbs, Controlled by Thought,” New York Times, May 20, 2015.
To go beyond rehabilitation: A. M. Dollar and H. Herr, “Lower extremity exoskeletons and active otheroses: Challenges and state-of-the-art,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics 24 (2008): 144–158.
In Marvel’s Iron Man comics: E. Paul Zehr, “Assembling an Avenger—Inside the Brain of Iron Man,” Scientific American Guest Blog, blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/assembling-an-avenger-inside-the-brain-of-iron-man, September 26, 2012.
For instance, the HAL-5: E. Guizzo and H. Goldstein, “The rise of the body bots,” IEEE Spectrum, October 1, 2005.
In a 2004 essay: Francis Fukuyama, “Transhumanism,” Foreign Policy (September/October 2004).
Nootropics also include dietary: G. Grosso et al., “Omega-3 fatty acids and depression: Scientific evidence and biological mechanisms,” Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity 2014 (2014): 313570; A. G. Malykh and M. R. Sadaie, “Piracetam and piracetam-like drugs: From basic science to novel clinical applications to CNS disorders,” Drugs 70 (2010): 287–312.
The most powerful nootropic: A. Dance, “Smart drugs: A dose of intelligence,” Nature 531 (2016): S2–3.
Although heavy-hitting: Margaret Talbot, “Brain Gain,” New Yorker, April 27, 2009.
A 2005 survey: S. E. McCabe, J. R. Knight, C. J. Teter, and H. Wechsler, “Non-medical use of prescription stimulants among US college students: Prevalence and correlates from a national survey,” Addiction 100 (2005): 96–106.
Several studies have questioned: J. Currie, M. Stabile, and L. E. Jones, “Do stimulant medications improve educational and behavioral outcomes for children with ADHD?” Journal of Health Economics 37 (2014): 58–69; I. Ilieva, J. Boland, and M. J. Farah, “Objective and subjective cognitive enhancing effects of mixed amphetamine salts in healthy people,” Neuropharmacology 64 (2013): 496–505; “AMA Confronts the Rise of Nootropics,” American Medical Association, www.ama-assn.org/ama-confronts-rise-nootropics, June 14, 2016.
Silicon Valley start-ups: T. Amirtha, “Scientists and Silicon Valley Want to Prove Psychoactive Drugs Are Healthy,” Guardian, February 8, 2016.
Nootrobox, for example: “Products,” Nootrobox, hvmn.com/products (accessed June 15, 2017).
Each ingredient is said: Nootrobox, Inc., “The Effects of SPRINT, a Combination of Natural Ingredients, on Cognition in Healthy Young Volunteers,” Clinical Trials Database, National Institutes of Health, 2016.
“If you aren’t taking”: “Alpha Brain,” Onnit Labs, June 15, 2017.
Explains businessman and self-help: Laurie Segall and Erica Fink, “Are Smart Drugs Driving Silicon Valley?” CNN, January 26, 2015.
“All this may be leading”: Talbot, “Brain Gain.”
Meanwhile, despite the fact: Nicholas Kristof, “Overreacting to Terrorism,” New York Times, March 24, 2016.
They argue that “cognitive-enhancing”: H. Greely et al., “Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy,” Nature 456 (2008): 702–705.
Putting the debate: Expert Group on Cognitive Enhancements, Boosting Your Brainpower: Ethical Aspects of Cognitive Enhancements, British Medical Association, 2007.
Particularly given the prevalence: Behavioral Health Trends in the United States: Results from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2015.
“Prometheus stole fire”: Ken Goffman (aka R. U. Sirius) and Dan Joy, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (New York: Villard Books, 2004).
We can see aspects: Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras, “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations,” Guardian, June 11, 2013; Dominic Basulto, “Aaron Swartz and the Rise of the Hacktivist Hero,” Washington Post, January 14, 2013.
It is the story: The reader must forgive some poetic license in this chapter.
“Never give in;”: Winston Churchill, “Never Give In, Never (Speech at Harrow),” National Churchill Museum, www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/never-give-in-never-never-never.html, October 29, 1941.
The ancient Egyptians: James F. Romano, Death, Burial, and Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, Carnegie Series on Egypt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). Some accounts of ancient Egyptian beliefs describe further components to the soul, including the person’s name and representations of the heart and shadow.
The oldest Indian writings: The Rig Veda: An Anthology, translated by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (New York: Penguin, 2005).
The Pentateuch gave us: Matt Stefon, ed., Judaism: History, Belief, and Practice (New York: Britannica Educational, 2012); Joshua Dickey, ed., The Complete Koine-English Reference Bible: New Testament, Septuagint and Strong’s Concordance (Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2014) (e-book).