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Full Description
In his latest book, David Bainbridge combines an otherworldly journey through the central nervous system with an accessible and entertaining account of how the brain's anatomy has often misled anatomists about its function. Bainbridge uses the structure of the brain to set his book apart from the many volumes that focus on brain function. He shows that for hundreds of years, natural philosophers have been interested in the gray matter inside our skulls, but all they had to go on was its structure. Almost every knob, protrusion, canal, and crease was named before anyone had an inkling of what it did--a kind of biological terra incognita with many weird and wonderful names: the zonules of Zinn, the obex ("the most Scrabble-friendly word in all of neuroanatomy"), the aqueduct of Sylvius, the tract of Goll.
This uniquely accessible approach lays out what is known about the brain (its structure), what we can hope to know (its function), and what we may never know (its evolution). Along the way Bainbridge tells lots of wonderful stories about the "two pounds of blancmange" within our skulls, and tells them all with wit and style.
Contents
* Prologue I. A Grand Tour of Terra Incognita The spinal cord * Skull Marrow First thoughts about the mind * Servants and Guards of the Great King The classical brain * The Brain as Geography Maps of the mind * A River Runs Through It The development of a brain * Leonardo's Butterfly The spinal cord * Interlude The worm that turned (over) II. An Assault on the Senses The brain stem * A Forest So Dense The new anatomy of Santiago Ramon y Cajal * The Little Fish Who Never Grew Up The origins of the ear * The Brain as Archaeology The hindbrain * Beauty Is in the Eye of the, er, Squid The origins of the eye * Hillocks, Buttocks, Blindsight, and Black Stuff The midbrain * Stinkin' and Thinkin' The origins of the nose * Into the Marriage Chamber for Some Sexy Synesthesia Entering the forebrain * Why Is "D" Brown? When the senses mix * Interlude Shrapnel and magnets III. Where All the Mind May Be Found? The cortex * The Brain as Engineering Wilder Penfield and the cortex * The Apparent Disorder of the Cerebral Jungle What is in those hemispheres? * The Seahorse and the Almond Memory, learning, and fear * The Hard Question Brain size and consciousness * Epilogue: No Turning Back * Further Reading * Index
