D. F. Swaab - We Are Our Brains: A Neurobiography of the Brain, from the Womb to Alzheimers

Copyright 2014 by D. F. Swaab

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Swaab, D. F. (Dick Frans)

We are our brains: a neurobiography of the brain, from the womb to Alzheimers / D. F. Swaab ; translated by Jane Hedley-Prle.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8129-9296-0

eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64437-8

1. Brain. 2. BrainResearch. 3. Neurosciences. I. Title.

QP376.S858 2014

612.82dc23 2013020412

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Jacket design: Thomas Ng

Jacket image (silhouette of child): Cut Arts, Inc.

v3.1

Contents

Illustrations

The brain seen from the side, with the parts of the cerebral cortex labeled.

Cross section of the brain.

Starting the birth process.

An anencephalic newborn.

The localization of oxytocin and vasopressin in the brain.

A synapse as seen under an electron microscope.

Brain scans of two three-year-old children, one who was brought up normally and one who was severely neglected.

Brocas area and Wernickes area.

A child born in Amsterdams Wilhelmina Gasthuis hospital during the famine of 19441945.

The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), a region of the brain important for sexual behavior.

Comparing the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis in men, women, and transsexuals.

Postcard received after the author published the first findings of a difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men, in 1989.

Another item of correspondence received after the author published the first findings of the difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men.

Cartoon by Peter van Straaten after the publication of the first findings of the difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men (1989).

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) as seen from the side.

The dopaminergic reward system.

Psychogenic erections and the passage of erotic impulses.

The human hypothalamus.

Narcolepsy.

The cerebral cortex, the thalamus, and the white matter.

The brain seen from below.

Some specialized cortical areas.

A depth electrode in the subthalamic nucleus of the brain of a Parkinsons patient.

Effect of Parkinsons disease on the motor area.

The basal nuclei and acetylcholine.

The route taken by information on its way to long-term memory.

Some brain systems involved in emotions.

The angular gyrus.

The two types of lesions associated with Alzheimers.

Brain shrinkage in frontotemporal dementia.

A patient in the final stage of Alzheimers.

Atrophy of the cerebral cortex in Alzheimers.

Atrophied neurons in the nucleus basalis of Meynert.

Slices of tissue from the brain of a patient with Alzheimers.

Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman.

Many of the views which have been advanced are highly speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous; but I have in every case given the reasons which have led me to one view rather than to another. False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

I know full well that the reader has no great desire to know all this, but I have the desire to tell them of it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Perhaps the two greatest scientific questions of this century are How did the universe come into being? and How does the brain work? Through a combination of my surroundings and chance, I became fascinated by the second question.

I grew up in a household where I overheard such enthralling conversations about every aspect of medicine that it became impossible to escape going into the profession. My father was a gynecologist who devoted his working life to many aspects of reproduction that were then highly controversial, like male infertility, artificial insemination, and the contraceptive pill. He received a stream of visits from friends whom I only later realized were pioneers in their fields. As a small child I got my first lessons in endocrinology from Dries Querido, who later set up Rotterdams medical faculty. When I noticed our family dog cock his leg against a tree as we took it for a walk, Professor Querido explained that his behavior was caused by the effect of sex hormones on the brain. Coen van Emde Boas, the first Dutch professor of sexology, used to drop by in the evenings with his wife for a drink. His stories were gripping, particularly for a small boy. I recall an anecdote he told about a patient with whom he was having trouble communicating. Finally the man came out with what had been bothering him: He had heard that Van Emde Boas was a homosexual! Van Emde Boas put an arm around his shoulders and said, But my dear, surely you dont believe that? We laughed uproariously when he described the look on the patients face. It was a household in which there was no question you couldnt ask, and during the weekends my father let me look at his medical books and peer through his microscope at plant cells and unicellular creatures fished out of local ditches.

When I was in secondary school, my father took me with him on a lecture tour of the country. I will never forget the hostile response he got from very religious members of the audience when he lectured on the contraceptive pill, which was going to be tested in the Netherlands for the first time. Despite the insults hurled at him, he went on arguing his case, remaining outwardly calm, while I sat sweating next to him, in an agony of embarrassment. In retrospect it was good training for the extremely heated reactions that my own research would later spark. An occasional visitor to our house at that time was Gregory Pincus, the developer of the contraceptive pill. I got my first sight of a laboratory when I was taken along with him on a visit to Organon, the pharmaceutical factory where the pill was produced.

With such a background it seemed to me self-evident that I would study medicine. At meals I would enthusiastically discuss medicine with my father so directly and in such detail that my mother would regularly beg us to stop, even though, having worked as an operating theater nurse and at the front during the war between Russia and Finland in 1939, she was hardly squeamish.