From the Publisher

What makes one man a genius and another a criminal? Is there a physical explanation for these differences? For hundreds of years, scientists have been fascinated by this question.
In Postcards from the Brain Museum, Brian Burrell relates the story of the first scientific attempts to locate the sources of both genius and depravity in the physical anatomy of the human brain. It describes the men who studied and collected special brains, the men who gave them up, and the sometimes cruel fate of the brains themselves.
The fascination with elite brains was an aspect of the scientific mania for measurement that gripped the Western world in the mid-nineteenth century, along with a passionate interest in the biological basis of genius or exceptional talent. Many leading intellectuals and artists willed their brains to science, and the brains of notorious criminals were also collected by eager anatomists ghoulishly waiting in the execution chamber with a bag full of sharp metal tools.
Focusing on the posthumous sagas of brains belonging to Byron, Whitman, Lenin, Einstein, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, and many others, Burrell describes how the brains of famous men were first collected—by means both fair and foul—and then weighed, measured, dissected, and compared; exhaustive studies analyzed their fissural complexity and cell or neuron size.
In various cities in Europe, Russia, and the United States, brain collections were painstakingly assembled and studied. A veritable who’s who of literary, artistic, musical, scientific, and political achievement waited in Formalin-filled jars for their secrets to be unlocked.
The men who built thebrain collections were colorful and eccentric figures like Rudolph Wagner, whose study of the brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss led to one of the great scientific debates of the nineteenth century. In America, the Fowler brothers brought phrenology to the United States and made a convert of Walt Whitman, whose brain was donated to science and disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Eventually, this project was abandoned, and with the discovery of new technologies the study of the brain has moved on to a higher plane. But the collections themselves still exist, and today, in Paris, London, Stockholm, Philadelphia, Moscow, and even Tokyo, the brains of nineteenth century geniuses sit idle, gathering dust in their jars. Brian Burrell has visited these collections and looked into the original intentions and purposes of their creators. In the process, he unearths a forgotten byway in the history of science—a tale of colorful eccentrics bent on laying bare the secrets of the human mind.

The New Yorker

Franz Josef Gall’s invention of phrenology, in the early eighteen-hundreds, marked the start of the scientific community’s lasting obsession with dissecting and measuring the human brain. It seemed reasonable that the brains of exceptional people—whether geniuses or criminals—must share common physical traits that fostered those respective traits, and so scientists obtained and preserved exceptional brains for post-mortem study. The brains of Whitman, Einstein, Lenin, and Charles Guiteau (the assassin of President Garfield) were all recruited for the cause. Several brain collections survive, and Burrell has made a tour of them. He nimbly encompasses science, philosophy, and social history to create an astute and sympathetic history of a scientific cul-de-sac. His dismissal of much contemporary brain science, however—in a chapter called “The New Phrenologists”—smacks of argumentative overreach.

Publishers Weekly

When scientists first began probing the human mind, it was commonly believed that the brain itself could provide insight to an individual's mental capacities. Though fields like phrenology-analyzing the brain from the shape of the skull-have been discredited, Burrell (Damn the Torpedoes) reminds us that modern neuroscience shares many of the same preoccupations, including the central notion that the brain contains markers for mental and physical conditions. His history is therefore less a chronicle of quackery than a sympathetic account of scientific innovators whose ideas didn't quite pan out. Anthropologist Cesare Lombroso's theories in the 19th century about the criminal brain, for example, have never been entirely abandoned, and Burrell considers why it was so appealing to many Europeans of the time. Though such proto-neurosurgeons dominate his tale, Burrell also focuses on some of the brilliant minds they studied. We all know Einstein's brain was saved, but how many Americans know that the KGB had a full-time guard on Lenin's dissected organ? Or that Walt Whitman donated his brain to science, only to have a clumsy researcher destroy it? Burrell cites works by Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould that have told parts of this history, and his engaging account earns a place next to these illustrious predecessors on any science reader's bookshelf. (On sale Jan. 11) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Burrell (mathematics, Univ. of Massachusetts; Damn the Torpedoes) has written an engaging account of the search for an anatomy of genius. Ever since Descartes insisted that the mind exists separately from the brain, humans have been obsessed with how the brain's structure might confer brilliance (or criminal madness) to its owner. The author identifies the major players in this obsession and chronicles the development of autopsy societies in which members mutually agreed to donate their brains for study by their surviving colleagues. There is a fascinating history of phrenology, from its initial attention to skull bumps to a focus on the brain itself and, finally, to our modern concept of cerebral localization. The irony of "scientific materialism," in which science was freed from religious constraints, is the emergence of a new religion in which "intellectual giants like Einstein and Gauss took the place of saints." Objectivity, unfortunately, took a backseat to preconceptions about genius, and the results created a bizarre era in the history of scientific research. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An examination of the scientific fad of collecting brains of the famous in hopes of discovering the key to their genius. Burrell (Mathematics/Univ. of Mass, Amherst; The Words We Live By, 1997) begins with the famous scene from the film Frankenstein where a scientist compares the brains of a genius and a criminal-a scene that appears nowhere in Mary Shelley's novel but neatly suggests the prevailing attitude toward brains. The notion that the size and shape of a brain was key to its thinking power came originally from phrenology, and, tracing the careers of the early phrenologists, Burrell points out that despite the failure of their program of using skull shape to diagnose mental capacity, they nonetheless carried forward the radical notion that the mind is a direct consequence of physical structures of the brain. Later scientists removed, preserved, and examined the brains of both of those geniuses and violent criminals in an attempt to discover the structural differences underlying behavior. Many of those researchers-among them a number of American doctors and scientists-formed clubs with the object of donating their own brains for postmortem examination and the benefit of science. Sadly, little useful scientific work was done. Walt Whitman's brain was accidentally destroyed before it could be examined, and others got only perfunctory analysis. Worse yet, as in the case of the Italian criminologist Lombroso, some of the scientists' work was later taken out of context and used to justify genocide and racism. Or, in the case of Lenin's brain, the examining scientist cynically used the opportunity to gain funding for other work. In a useful concluding chapter, Burrell points out that,even today, the gains of brain science are at best controversial. A broad and revealing study of a little-known and often unflattering chapter of science.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0641820550
  
• ISBN-13: 9780641820557
• Format: Hardcover, 256pp
• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Pub. Date: January 2005
• Edition Description: Bargain
• Sales Rank: 28,751

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

Postcards from the Brain Museum

Random House

Chapter One

Chapter 1


The Most Complex Object in the Universe


As neuroscientists never tire of pointing out, the adult human brain is the single most complex object in the universe, and one of the least understood. On average, it weighs about three and a half pounds, most of which is fragile, malleable tissue--so fragile that the brain is the most difficult part of the body to access, remove, handle, and study. A Soviet neuroscientist once likened its consistency to the insides of a watermelon, but even that overstates its structural integrity. If placed on a table, a fresh brain will quickly surrender to gravity and collapse into a heap (more like gelatin than watermelon). Within eight hours, it will begin to decompose, the first part of a dead body to do so. There may indeed be nothing so complex in the universe, nor anything quite as delicate.

The familiar shape of the human brain is somewhat misleading. As a ubiquitous graphic symbol, its most prominent feature, the massive, fissured cerebrum, has come to symbolize the unlimited potential of human thought, if not the very means of man's dominion over the planet. Yet it also bears an unmistakable resemblance to a comical turban, and for most of recorded history it was treated that way.

Until the 1600s, anatomists drew the brain's tortuous surface as amass of undifferentiated folds, which they likened in their randomness to the folds of the small intestine.1 After puzzling over its purpose, they concluded that the folds were nothing more than an apparatus for the manufacture of phlegm, which the brain squeezed out through the sinuses, and for producing tears, which it squeezed out through the eyes. Only in the last 150 years have scientists come to appreciate what really goes on in those folds, and that their rapid evolution, seemingly accomplished over the last million years, is easily the most impressive achievement in Darwin's universe. In hindsight, the human brain is a triumph of adaptation, so impressive both in size and reputation that until recently it has succeeded in hiding what has in common with the brains of all mammals, which turns out to be quite a bit.

The principal parts of the mammalian brain are the brain stem, the cerebellum, and the forebrain. The stem houses the physical plant. It monitors and regulates unconscious physical processes such as breathing, blood flow, digestion, and glandular secretion. It consists of the medulla, an extension of the spinal cord, a nodule called the pons, and a short connector called the midbrain. The cerebellum, or little brain, lies behind this assembly, and it is aptly named. With its striated exterior and dual hemispheres (at least in primates), it hangs behind the cantilevered back porch of the forebrain like a wasp's nest. Although its role is still not completely understood, the cerebellum is believed to act as a kind of automatic pilot for fine muscle control. If recent studies are correct, it also plays a role in short-term memory, attention, impulse control, emotion, cognition, and future planning. Researchers suspect that it might be a kind of backup unit, an auxiliary brain. Its loss, while far from desirable, is not fatal. The rest of the brain seems to be able to compensate. The forebrain, on the other hand, is indispensable. It is what makes humans human, and, as a result, the search for the anatomical locus of genius, criminality, or insanity begins there.

Neurologists tend to be of two minds about the forebrain. Some see it as two complementary but sometimes competing hemispheres, an uneasy coalition of rationality and impulse. Others attribute the same inner struggle to a cold brain and a hot brain, the entire cerebrum being the source of cool calculation, and a set of nested organs called the limbic system giving rise to hot instincts and urges. The left brain-right brain dichotomy originated in the 1960s when neurosurgeons intervened in acute cases of epilepsy by severing the corpus callosum, the fiber bundle that allows the two hemispheres to communicate with each other. In most cases the seizures went away, leaving patients with a curious split personality. The notion of a hot brain and a cold brain is somewhat older, and reflects a belief that higher functions, specifically the intellect, are situated literally and figuratively above the lower functions. Just as the intellect is supposed to keep the passions in check, the massive cerebrum envelops the limbic organs--the thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala--and, on good days, dominates them. Some psychologists like to refer to the embedded limbic system as the reptile brain, a term they invented as a way to market themselves to Madison Avenue and Hollywood. The impulsive animal brain, they say, seeks dominance, safety, or sustenance, and it wants everything NOW--everything from an ice cream sundae to a sport utility vehicle, with little concern for practicality or consequence. Without the intervention of the cold, rational brain, the reptile brain can act quite unreasonably in getting what it craves.

Whether we really are of two minds in a literal sense is far from proven. Yet there is no denying that every mind undergoes a constant struggle between reason and emotion, between impulse and hesitation, between short-term strategies and long-term planning. The conscious brain struggles to rein in the unconscious, to calm nameless fears and anxieties. But if human beings, which is to say the human brain, hot or cold, can be characterized by one driving force, it would have to be curiosity, which has allowed it to explain just about everything in the universe, with two notable exceptions--the universe and itself.

What distinguishes a human brain from an animal brain, from an actual reptile brain? The size of the cerebrum, for one thing, and thus its surface area. But size, it turns out, isn't everything. The brain of an elephant, for example, is about four times as large as a man's, a blue whale's almost six times as large. Neither, of course, can match the forty-to-one body-to-brain-weight ratio in humans, but if ratios were all that mattered, the lowly field mouse, with a body-to-brain ratio of eight-to-one, would sit at the head of the class. Although the thinking part of the cerebrum, its outer shell, is four times thicker in humans than in rats, and four hundred times greater in surface area, the difference between men and mice is several orders of magnitude larger than dimensions alone can explain. It is not so much a matter of size, as of cerebral specialization. As the Alexandrian physician Erasistratus guessed in the fourth century b.c., the advantage lies in the folds, which are more developed in man than in any of the beasts.(2)

Are the folds in the brains of geniuses different from the folds of ordinary folk? The possibility has haunted investigators for a century and a half, and still has its supporters. Although not the only candidate for the anatomical substrate of genius, the folds are easily the front-runner because, contrary to the writings of the ancient anatomists, they are not entirely random. And where there is a pattern, there is assumed to be a meaning. In order to appreciate these patterns, you will not need a medical degree and a copy of Gray's Anatomy. To navigate the brain's tortuous surface, a thumbnail sketch should suffice.


To appreciate the rudimentary topology of the folds of the brain, place your right hand on the table and make a loose fist, relaxing the index finger so that the tip of the thumb rests inside the crux of the first knuckle. In other words, turn your hand into a talking clam, a puppet. Now shut the clam's mouth and imagine the hand enclosed in a mitten. What you are looking at, roughly speaking, is the left cerebral hemisphere of a primate brain. To turn it into a human brain, exchange for the mitten a boxing glove.

The surface of a real brain, of course, is riven by fissures, but these can easily be supplied with a pen. Begin by drawing a heavy line across the knuckles. In a real brain, this line is called the central sulcus (the Latin word for fissure); in older texts it is called the fissure of Rolando, after the eighteenth-century Italian anatomist who first described it. Just in front of this line is the precentral gyrus (gyri, also known as convolutions, are ridges of tissue that lie between fissures); just behind the precentral gyrus lies another ridge called the postcentral gyrus. The first of these contains the motor cortex, which in the left hemisphere controls movement on the right side of the body. The arrangement is inverted--the highest part of the gyrus, nearest the crown of the head, controls the foot, then comes the leg, and so on down to the lowest part of the gyrus, near the temple, which controls the hand and face. The postcentral gyrus registers sensation in a similar mapping. Taken together, these two convolutions, running over the crown of the head, form what is called the sensorimotor cortex.

Another important fissure, the lateral or Sylvian fissure, does not need to be drawn. It coincides with the gap between the thumb and the hand in the boxing glove model, and like that gap, it is very deep. A third useful line of reference, the occipital sulcus, should be added to the picture as a light line running across the very back of the hand, an inch or so above the wrist. Although there are a few other important fissures, these three--the central, Sylvian, and occipital--allow the hemisphere to be divided into its principal parts, the lobes.

The division of the hemispheres into lobes did not come about until the 1850s, and is generally credited to a French anatomist named Louis-Pierre Gratiolet.(3) It may come as a shock to discover that the lobes are not separate and independent units, that Gratiolet divided them somewhat arbitrarily and named them out of convenience by borrowing the words that describe the adjoining bones of the skull. There are four of them--the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital bones--delimited by the sutures, the skull's clearly visible expansion joints. Before Gratiolet came along, anatomists referred to the lobes of the brain using descriptors such as "posterior" and "anterior." But what Gratiolet noticed, after comparing hundreds of primate brains, was that although the pattern of folds in each brain is unique, there is a noticeable regularity to each one, especially in the deep fissures, much like the lines on the palm of the hand. The three primary fissures noted above, Gratiolet discovered, exist in the otherwise smooth brains of apes. They are also the first fissures to develop in the human fetus. It seemed only natural to use them as boundary lines for the four lobes. (A fifth lobe, tucked in the deep fold of the Sylvian fissure, completed the picture. Gratiolet called it the central lobe, although it is now known as the insula, and also, rather evocatively, as the island of Reil.)

The four principal lobes are easy to locate on the glove model of the brain. The frontal lobe lies above the Sylvian fissure and in front of the central sulcus. It is, essentially, the part of the boxing glove that encloses the fingers. Behind the central fissure lies the parietal lobe (that is, the back of the hand). The thumb of the glove, below the Sylvian fissure, represents the temporal lobe, and it extends as far back as the knuckle nearest the thumb's web. The base of the thumb, including its large pad of muscle, stands in for the occipital lobe. The dividing line is the occipital fissure. To picture the insula, imagine a handkerchief tucked into the fist, as in a magician's sleight of hand, and open up the thumb to reveal it.

Pierre Gratiolet did not believe that his division of the hemispheres into lobes had any functional significance. He preferred to think that the cortex worked more or less as a unit. But within ten years of his death in 1865, he would be proved wrong. During the 1870s, researchers in Germany and England produced detailed maps of cortical functions by stimulating the exposed brains of dogs, cats, and monkeys with electrical shocks. Through painstaking (if not pains-giving) labors they succeeded in correlating regions to reactions, and in the process set off a worldwide humane movement of antivivisectionists. At the same time, and less controversially, other researchers attempted to match clinical observations of neurological symptoms with postmortem examinations of brain lesions and tumors (a field known as morbid anatomy). In 1861, for example, Gratiolet's friend Paul Broca, a pioneering surgeon, demonstrated two instances of damage to the third frontal convolution in the left hemisphere in patients suffering from aphasia, a condition marked by the inability to produce speech. A decade later, the German psychiatrist Carl Wernicke isolated several other cases in which damage to the temporal lobe destroyed the ability to comprehend spoken or written language, while speech production remained unimpaired.

A quick consultation of the fist model of the brain shows a correspondence between the proximal phalanx of the index finger and the third frontal convolution of the cortex. This is Broca's area, a left-brain module (in right-handed people) responsible for the mechanical production of speech. Below it, in the web of the thumb (that is, in the temporal lobe), is Wernicke's area, which handles language processing and speech recognition.

Through similar investigations the visual cortex was found to be situated in the occipital lobe, and the acoustic areas in the temporal lobes, but the experiments went only so far. There remained (and still remain) areas in each lobe, especially in the frontal and parietal lobes, that are not assigned motor or sensory roles. These have been lumped together as the so-called association areas, and are believed to be connected with memory, spatial and temporal orientation, and the intellect.

Keep in mind that your actual hand, the right fist you are looking at, is controlled by a relatively large part of the motor cortex in the left hemisphere it represents, a fact noted even by some of the ancients. This contralateralism--left controlling right, and vice versa--arises in the spinal cord at a splitting and crossing just below the brain stem in a place known, rather exotically, as the decussation of the pyramids. This is where the brain ends. Or at least it is where the pathologist cuts the spinal cord when removing it.


Given the complexity of what lies beneath, the outward aspect of the cerebral hemispheres, especially in a preserved brain, is deceiving. Its bloodless, somewhat bloated, aspect suggests a solid, homogeneous core--a cauliflower, perhaps. The business of thinking, it might seem, goes on somewhere in the middle. But as it turns out, the real action takes place near the surface. What goes on inside is a good deal of networking.

If you take a wide blade and cut straight through a brain, the resulting cross section will reveal a thin beige rind bordering vast estuaries of pink.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from Postcards from the Brain Museum by Brian Burrell Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---