Carl Zimmer - Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind

Brain Cuttings

Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind

Carl Zimmer

Scott & Nix, Inc.New York

To Grace, to whom my thoughts always turn

Text copyright by Carl Zimmer

All rights reserved.

Published by
Scott & Nix, Inc.
150 West 28th Street, Suite 1003
New York, NY 10001
www.scottandnix.com

The essays in this edition were originally published in a slightly different form in Discover and Playboy .

First electronic edition published in October, 2010.

ISBN (PDF): 978-1-935622-14-7
ISBN (ePub): 978-1-935622-15-4
ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-935622-16-1

Cover illustration from De humani corporis fabrica libri septem , Andreas Vesalius, 1543.

Praise for Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind

Carl Zimmer takes us behind the scenes in our own heads. He has ferreted out all the most wondrous, bizarre stories and studies and served them up in this delicious, sizzling, easy-to-digest platter of neuro-goodness.

Mary Roach, author of Packing for Mars and Stiff

If you want to jump start your knowledge about how the brain does all those marvelous things for us like think, feel, and deal with others, read these essays. Zimmer has the rare capacity to get the science right and make it all feel like a glass of smooth bourbon.

Michael Gazzaniga, Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara, author of Human: The Science of What Makes Us Unique

These essays combine that rare blend of precision and wonder, hard-nosed reporting and nose for the poetically spooky. The brain should be very pleased to have Carl Zimmer as its scribe.

Jad Abumrad, host and creator of Radiolab

Carl Zimmer is one of the finest science writers around. In this fascinating tour of the brain, he explores the meaning of time, the genetic tug of war between parents, the science of anesthesia and a dozen other absorbing tales of the meaty computer inside our head.

Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Few writers are as clear and wide-ranging as Zimmer. In these fifteen day-trips into modern neuroscience, he clears away the fog of jargon to give us a clear view of the newly discovered land.

David Eagleman, Baylor College of Medicine, author of Sum

Praise for Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed the World

Fascinatingthrilling Zimmer has produced a top-notch work of popular science.

Ross King, Los Angeles Times

Soul Made Flesh is a tour de force, eloquently and excitingly written, powerfully re-creating the atmosphere and personalities of the time, and making the science agreeably intelligible to the non-scientist.

Sunday Telegraph

Carl Zimmers illuminating book charts a fascinating chapter in the souls journey

New York Times Book Review

Zimmers prose is wonderfully lucid, his curiosity wide.

Daily Telegraph

For anyone interested in the history of medicine it is a must read.

British Medical Journal

Praise for Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life

Superb quietly revolutionary.

The Boston Globe

This is a thought-provoking book that wrenches us from our human-centred perspective and gives us a guide to life through the chemical-sensing molecules of a species that was here long before we were, and which will certainly outlive us.

The Guardian

Microcosm is exciting, original and wholly persuasive of the beauty and utility of looking at the largest of issues from the smallest perspectives.

New Scientist

From Victorian England to contemporary America, creationists have often denied that we are related to other primates. But the hard truth of our genealogy does even greater damage to human pride. We are cousins of every living thing, including the billions of E. coli bacteria in our intestines. This kinship may not be flattering, but it is useful. By studying these tiny creatures, we learn about other organisms, including ourselves. As the French biologist Jacques Monod once said, What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant. Carl Zimmer effectively applies this principle in his engrossing new book, Microcosm , relating the study of these microbes to larger developments in biology and thoughtfully discussing the social implications of science.

New York Times Book Review

Microcosm is a bracing read. This timely book deserves shelf space near Lewis Thomas classic, Lives of a Cell .

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Written in elegant, even poetic prose, Zimmers well-crafted exploration should be required reading for all well-educated readers.

Publishers Weekly

Its creepy, mind-twisting, and delightful all at the same time.

Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map and Mind Wide Open

Praise for Parasite Rex

With Parasite Rex , Zimmer proves himself as fine a science essayist as we have.

The New York Times Book Review

Parasite Rex is a book capable of changing how we see the world.

Los Angeles Times

A great bookRead Parasite Rex . Read it twice.

Science

Superba non-stop delight.

New Scientist

Extensively researched and written in captivating, fast-moving style, Parasite Rex is a masterful account of creatures that youd like to ignore but who are simply too creepy to forget.

The Globe and Mail

About the Author

Carl Zimmer is the author of eight books including Parasite Rex , Soul Made Flesh , and Microcosm . He writes frequently about science for The New York Times , National Geographic , Time , Scientific American , and Discover , where he serves as a contributing editor and writes a column about the brain. He is a two-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences Journalism Award, and the National Academies Science Communication Award. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Grace and their children, Charlotte and Veronica.

For more information, visit carlzimmer.com .

Contents

Preface

The brain is constantly in the news, but too often it gets treated as nothing more than a self-help machine, existing only to be tweaked and tuned in order to get you that big promotion at work or to lose those last ten pounds. The brain is far more interesting than that. It is a mysterious network, made of hundreds of billions of cells joined by trillions of connections. Somehow it gives rise to our feelings, our memories, and our sense of ourselves. It is not three pounds of perfection; it is the quirky result of billions of years of evolution, and its history is folded into its convolutions.

In Brain Cuttings I dive into fifteen parts of that mystery, from the speed of thought to the thinking glue that holds the brain together. All but one of the chapters began as columns for Discover . Too Clever, the final chapter, was originally published in a somewhat different form in Playboy . I would like to thank my editors at both magazinesCorey Powell and Bob Keating at Discover , and Chris Napolitano at Playboy . And Id like to thank the publishers of this book, Charles Nix and George Scott, for joining hands and jumping off this editorial cliff together, just to see what happens.

Does Shame Excite a Blush?

Darwin would have loved Botox.

I dont mean that he would have been first in line at the doctors office to get a needle jabbed into his famously furrowed brow. I mean that Darwin would have loved to use Botox as a scientific toolto eavesdrop on the intimate conversation between the face and brain.

For much of his life, Darwin was obsessed with faces. On a visit to the London Zoo, he gave mirrors to a pair of orangutans and watched them grimace and pucker their lips as they stared at their reflections. He spent many afternoons gazing at photographs of crying babies and laughing women. He showed his friends pictures of a man whose facial muscles had been distorted by electric shocks, and quizzed them about what emotion the man appeared to be feeling. To find out if all humans expressed emotions in the same way, Darwin wrote up a list of sixteen questions, which he sent to dozens of acquaintances around the world. His list of questions began: