Four Fascinating Science Reads
Written By Dika Ojiakor & Vlad Novikov
The tale of the dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery – Sam Kean
Strokes, seizures, accidents: these are some of the traumas early neuroscientists relied on to understand the brain’s wondrous workings. Through close observation of the transformations in personality brought about by these traumas, early scientists were able to provide insights into the flaws in the brain that led to strange but telling consequences. In this compulsively readable history of several of these early misadventures of the brain, the award-winning science writer Sam Kean systematically weaves together historical anecdotes and complex neuroscience to tell the story of how we came to understand which parts of the brain control which functions. A favorite story of mine is of the rare Capgras syndrome, a victim of which can see and recognize family members. But because of separate lesions in two different areas of the brain, the victim believes that – despite recognizing the appearance of people he sees – they are not his family members but are imposters!
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—And Us – Richard O. Prum
Scientific dogma holds that every detail of an animal’s mating displays – every spot on the peacock’s tail – is simply a reflection and an advertisement of its genetic or material fitness. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? In this exhilarating tour de force, Richard O. Prum, a Yale ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, offers a partial answer: that choosing a mate for the mere pleasure of it, as Darwin proposed, is an independent engine of evolutionary change. The book ranges from hard science to speculation, and though the author makes clear that he does not expect his colleagues to agree with him on all fronts, it is a book that connects evolutionary theory to the origins and diversity of human sexuality in an accessible and potentially revolutionary way.
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory – A. R. Luria
“The Mind of a Mnemonist” is a remarkable case study of a patient with a rare and idiosyncratic neurological condition, called synesthesia. People with this condition have overlapped senses, meaning that they can hear color, taste shapes, smell words, and experience a cornucopia of other “sensory cocktails”. The patient, Solomon, is also a mnemonist—that is, he possesses an impervious ability to encode memories and then recollect them with perfect fidelity, even if it involves memorizing long speeches and poems written in foreign languages. In addition to his immaculate memory, he has a surreal way of coordinating all his senses in seconds to solve any logical problem you throw at him, an experience that he details step by step in this delightful book. While Solomon’s synesthesia may seem like a blessing, he often thinks of his condition as a curse, for he lost one attribute of his mind that many of us overlook: the ability to forget.
An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales – Oliver Sacks
In “An Anthropologist on Mars”, Dr. Oliver Sacks, a renowned neurologist, posits that diseases, disorders, and defects of the brain can often play paradoxical roles, by precipitating powers that “normal minds” cannot experience or even fathom. This book sympathetically describes in meticulous detail seven such savants, including a Tourette’s patient that learned to control his involuntary tics by becoming a surgeon and operating on other peoples’ brains; a young boy with autism who can sketch out whole landscapes and cities from memory; and an artist who lost his color vision in a car accident but gained an ability to exploit his black and white vision to uncover a world few of us could imagine. It is this gaining of creative potential and atypical cognitive powers due to disease that forms the core of this book, making our human neurodiversity ever more salient.