The Tale Of The Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History Of The Human Brain As Revealed By True Stories Of Trauma, Madness, And Recovery Quotes
"His case also provides a convenient introduction to the brain’s layout and general makeup."
"During the charge, little light penetrated the cocoon of his helmet. Darkness was safety."
"The unlikely king, unlikely queen, and unlikely royal mistress were celebrating a supposed end to violence that day."
"Henri II, had never been groomed for the throne; he’d become heir apparent only when his handsomer and more charming older brother died."
"In 1559 Henri abruptly brought peace to France. He signed a treaty with Spain."
"Among those doctors attending the king was Ambroise Paré, a thin, prim man, who served as royal surgeon."
"Paré realized he’d effectively run an experiment, with astounding results, since his trial group had fared much better than his controls."
"Vesalius had dissected mostly cow brains, cow brains being large and abundant in the butcher stalls of Rome."
"Vesalius vowed to reform the science of anatomy."
"Vesalius, like a great artist, was the first person to really see it."
"God’s ways are not man’s ways, God’s reasons not man’s reasons."
"Kill Garfield. God first whispered this to Guiteau in May of 1881."
"The autopsy found the bullet nestled near his spine."
"Camillo Golgi was working by candlelight in the kitchen of an old Italian insane asylum when he elbowed over a beaker of silver solution onto some slices of owl brain."
"Cajal’s neurons were not continuous, but had tiny gaps between them."
"The neuron on the receiving end of a message must therefore sample the soup in a nearby synapse carefully."
"The soup in Charles Guiteau’s brain never tasted right."
"Loneliness, isolation, and a sense of helplessness can all deplete neurotransmitters—can poison the soup and sap vital ingredients."
"I never had much luck at anything, and this preyed upon me."
"We don’t see with the eyes, we don’t hear with the ears. All of that goes on in the brain."
"Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster."
"The brain constructs our sense of self from more than mere looks."
"If a face transplant demonstrates anything about what it means to be human, it may be that we are less superficial than we imagine."
"By abandoning the standards of the sighted world, he argued, he could tap into a more divine and more authentic beauty."
"His only duty was attending chapel twice a day and saying extra prayers for the king."
"The brain will indeed accept a new mien in the mirror—in part because it’s only a mien, a covering."
"Our brains are natural taxonomists: we cannot help but recognize certain things as special."
"For as long as human beings have waged wars, surgeons have lopped off limbs—although until recently soldiers rarely lived to speak of the experience."
"Sometime later, Dedlow felt a towel against his nose, then inhaled the fruity chemical pinch of chloroform."
"Despite what you might think, big body parts don’t need big patches of gray matter to function."
"The key point, however, is that this spot doesn’t stay blank. Because the brain is plastic, adjacent areas can colonize the hand region and use its neurons for their own ends."
"If an amputee strokes his cheek, for instance, he might feel his missing thumb being brushed."
"The net result is that face sensations keep stoking the mental memory of the hand and keep stirring the phantom awake."
"A few months after Turner’s Lane opened, Mitchell rushed over to the Battle of Gettysburg, where he saw for himself why the Civil War left so many limbless."
"But in the end, neuroscience proved impotent—and even today most Fore people remain convinced that sorcerers caused kuru."
"After all, the Fore had always cooked the bodies thoroughly before eating them, and their customs forbade children from dining on brains anyway, because eating brains supposedly stunted their growth."
"So perhaps the 'world’s rarest disease' holds the insight to preventing brain decay in human beings everywhere."
"Such joy would be inconceivable in ordinary life… complete harmony in myself and in the whole world."
"It seems daft, the antithesis of common sense. But as we learned with regard to fear, it’s probably emotions that produce common sense."
"When a scientist turns to philosophy, we know he’s over the hill."
"Brain surgery is a terrible profession. If I did not feel it would become very different in my lifetime, I should hate it."
"For a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life."
"If emotion without reason is blind, it’s equally true that reason without emotion is lame: a world run by Elliots would be a disaster."
"The strange thing was that Elliot’s memory, language, and motor skills remained intact, and his IQ remained in the 120s."
"No matter how much we want to believe otherwise, our rational, logical brains aren’t always in charge."
"Determining that will require a lot of hard thought and careful reasoning—which means that it will require listening to our emotions, to supplement our reasoning and make it more humane."
"He'd even begged Wilson to skip the speaking tour in 1919—a proposal that Wilson had raged at, considering it insubordination."
"Wilson spent much of the thirty-six-hour ride home staring out the window and occasionally weeping, the left half of his face sagging lower every hour."
"Meanwhile, the League of Nations treaty stalled in the Senate."
"He limped along with a cane, and photographers avoided shooting the melted left half of his face."
"In March 1915 Grayson had introduced Edith to the recently widowed Wilson, and Edith quid pro quoed by insisting that Wilson promote Grayson, a navy man, to rear admiral over dozens of better-qualified candidates."
"This latest stroke had paralyzed his left side, and he spent most days listening to Edith read or zoning out in the garden."
"Edith essentially became the first female president, controlling what papers Wilson saw and sending out memos in his name but her handwriting."
"He started sleeping through hearings, forgetting names, confusing facts on important cases, and whispering to aides about assassins."
"In fact, some delusions are so reproducible, and knock out such specific mental modules, that they’ve become a spectacular tool for probing one of the great mysteries of neuroscience: how cells and biochemicals give rise to the human mind, in all its oddness."
"When capturing a memory, neurons jury-rig a connection for the short term. They then solder those connections together with special proteins, a process called consolidation."
"Our brains, when recalling a memory, probably don’t just replay a pristine 'master copy' each time. Instead, they might have to re-create and re-record the memory each time through."
"Humans have richer, fuller memories, and our memories work differently. But not that differently, especially on a molecular level."
"The memories that most define us—our tenderest moments, our traumas—could be most prone to distortion, since we reminisce about them most often."
"Memories are memoirs, not autobiographies. And the memories we cherish most may make honest liars of us all."
"The largest structures in the brain are the left and right hemispheres."
"Human brains have striking left/right differences, especially with regard to language, the trait that best defines us as human beings."
"Consciousness isn’t a thing in a place; it’s a process in a population."
"The equilibrium or balance… between his intellectual faculties and his animal propensities seems to have been destroyed."
"Memories don’t just record our lives; they are our lives, in a real and profound sense."