The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

All my arcane boyhood pursuits had what I consider to be a pleasantly antiquated, Victorian flavor. The Victorian era ended over a century ago (technically in 1901) and might seem remote from twenty-first-century neuroscience. But I feel compelled to mention my early romance with nineteenth-century science because it was a formative influence on my style of thinking and conducting research.

Simply put, this “style” emphasizes conceptually simple and easy-to-do experiments. As a student I read voraciously, not only about modern biology but also about the history of science. I remember reading about Michael Faraday, the lower-class, self-educated man who discovered the principle of electromagnetism. In the early 1800s he placed a bar magnet behind a sheet of paper and threw iron filings on the sheet. The filings instantly aligned themselves into arcing lines. He had rendered the magnetic field visible! This was about as direct a demonstration as possible that such fields are real and not just mathematical abstractions. Next Faraday moved a bar magnet to and fro through a coil of copper wire, and lo and behold, an electric current started running through the coil. He had demonstrated a link between two entirely separate areas of physics: magnetism and electricity. This paved the way not only for practical applications—such as hydroelectric power, electric motors, and electromagnets—but also for the deep theoretical insights of James Clerk Maxwell. With nothing more than bar magnets, paper, and copper wire, Faraday had ushered in a new era in physics.

I remember being struck by the simplicity and elegance of these experiments. Any schoolboy or -girl can repeat them. It was not unlike Galileo dropping his rocks, or Newton using two prisms to explore the nature of light. For better or worse, stories like these made me a technophobe early in life. I still find it hard to use an iPhone, but my technophobia has served me well in other respects. Some colleagues have warned me that this phobia might have been okay in the nineteenth century when biology and physics were in their infancy, but not in this era of “big science,” in which major advances can only be made by large teams employing high-tech machines. I disagree. And even if it is partly true, “small science” is much more fun and can often turn up big discoveries. It still tickles me that my early experiments with phantom limbs (see Chapter 1) required nothing more than Q-tips, glasses of warm and cold water, and ordinary mirrors. Hippocrates, Sushruta, my ancestral sage Bharadwaja, or any other physicians between ancient times and the present could have performed these same basic experiments. Yet no one did.

Or consider Barry Marshall’s research showing that ulcers are caused by bacteria—not acid or stress, as every doctor “knew.” In a heroic experiment to convince skeptics of his theory, he actually swallowed a culture of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and showed that his stomach lining became studded with painful ulcers, which he promptly cured by consuming antibiotics. He and others later went on to show that many other disorders, including stomach cancer and even heart attacks, might be triggered by microorganisms. In just a few weeks, using materials and methods that had been available for decades, Dr. Marshall had ushered in a whole new era of medicine. Ten years later he won a Nobel Prize.

My preference for low-tech methods has both strengths and drawbacks, of course. I enjoy it—partly because I’m lazy—but it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. And this is a good thing. Science needs a variety of styles and approaches. Most individual researchers need to specialize, but the scientific enterprise as a whole is made more robust when scientists march to different drumbeats. Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, stale paradigms, an echo-chamber mentality, and cults of personality. A diverse dramatis personae is a powerful tonic against these ailments. Science benefits from its inclusion of the abstraction-addled, absent-minded professors, the control-freak obsessives, the cantankerous bean-counting statistics junkies, the congenitally contrarian devil’s advocates, the hard-nosed data-oriented literalists, and the starry-eyed romantics who embark on high-risk, high-payoff ventures, stumbling frequently along the way. If every scientist were like me, there would be no one to clear the brush or demand periodic reality checks. But if every scientist were a brush-clearing, never-stray-beyond-established-fact type, science would advance at a snail’s pace and would have a hard time unpainting itself out of corners. Getting trapped in narrow cul-de-sac specializations and “clubs” whose membership is open only to those who congratulate and fund each other is an occupational hazard in modern science.