It’s a great combination of medical history, biography and neuroscience. All the chapters are interesting and incredibly informative, using personal stories to relate how the brain works, or doesn’t work, with deep explanations for the why. This book was suggested to me by a neuroscientist friend, who also put me onto the idea of reading only a chapter or two at a time because that’s the way she read it. The man’s doctor could in fact see the brain pulsating through the open wound – and couldn’t resist reaching for a metal spatula. Not completely: his frontal skull bone was shattered and flipped upward like a fin.
But in early 1861 a Frenchman near Paris dug the business end of a pistol into his forehead and pulled the trigger. The man’s name and reasons for shooting himself – insanity? anguish? ennui? – are lost to history. A rebus (puzzle that involves piecing together pictures, letters, and sound) begins each chapter.Ī massive injury to someone’s brain is often an opening, so to speak, on a subject like this introduction to a study of the left, right and center parts of the brain.
At the end there is a wonderful notes section (where you will want to keep a second book marker), a Reading Groups Guide with an author’s interview, his list of Top Five Strangely Specific Brain Deficits, and questions and topics for discussion. I’ll try not to use the word fascinating too often, but seriously, this book is full of marvels.įilled with delightful tidbits beginning on the first page “(the very ‘mare’ in nightmare refers to a witch who delights in squatting on people’s chests.),” Sam Kean begins by describing his own brain oddness, sleep paralysis. No one will blame you for reading it a chapter at a time, as I did, maybe putting it down for a day or two and then taking it up for another fascinating tour through everyone’s favorite super computer. Like the title, this book takes a while to read. The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery
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