The brain as you’ve never seen it
Jaw- dropping illustrations and fascinating facts about our most mysterious organ
Beautiful new reference book explores the organ that controls our existence — even though much of the mind is a mystery to even those who study it.
We all have one, even if we accuse some people of only having half, or none at all. But, surprisingly for an organ that controls all aspects of man’s existence, the human brain is still mostly a mystery, even to the scientists who specialize in studying it.
Professor of anatomy Ken Ashwell has rounded up a slew of brain experts and collated what we do know to create this reference book, which details all aspects of the brain from birth to death.
Ashwell, who works at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, has done an impressive job of making such a complex subject understandable.
Starting from a place that most of us occupy ( assuming the reader has no previous knowledge of the subject), he peppers the text with jawdropping images – MRIs, micrographs ( photographs taken through a microscope), and detailed graphics — which display the brain like you’ve never seen, or thought of it, before.
But think of it we should. Noted neuroscientist Richard Restak, called “one of the world’s most important scientific thinkers” by Scientific American and professor of neurology at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D. C. has this to say in the book’s foreword:
“In the near future, I believe that neuroscience will be an integral part of everyone’s education. This effort will be justified by the benefits that will accrue from learning about the organ that is responsible for all that we are.”
There’s much to learn, and all of it is fascinating.
The first few chapters cover the basic functions of the brain, nerves and brain chemistry and development of the brain and spinal cord.
We learn about the parts of the brain and types of cells it contains, and what they do — mysterious sounding things like the reticular formation.
Buried at the core of the brain stem, it plays an important role in a wide variety of functions — movement, the sleep- wake cycle, breathing, heart rate, emotion and blood pressure.
We also learn that part of the cells in the reticular formation are profoundly affected in old age — 30 to 50 per cent are lost from early adulthood to old age, and this is especially noticeable in patients with Alzheimer’s disease ( dementia is covered in more depth in later chapters).
Later chapters explore the senses — taste ( you can taste with your stomach and esophagus as well, I discovered), smell, touch, hearing, vision, balance, acceleration and pain. ( An amazing PET scan illustration shows areas of the brain that are active during a cardiac pain attack; scary.)
Gender and sexuality is covered in detail, and both sides of the debate over whether there are gender- or sexuality- related differences in brain structure between the sexes are covered. Essentially the differences are not great, however one noticeably robust difference is that boys outnumber girls 13 to one on advanced mathematical reasoning. By the time we get to chapters covering movement and actions, we have discovered that making a movement requires so much more than the cerebral cortex deciding to make a move and telling the muscle to contract — we need the complex systems that aid muscle activation or our movements would be spasmodic, exhausting and uncontrolled.
The final chapters in this book concentrate on the thorny questions of consciousness, mood, and psychosis.
Although unable to answer the big questions like “where am I in my brain?” ( unsurprising since it has confounded countless philosophers for centuries) we can find out things like how we store memories and why memories are much more intense when they are linked with strong emotion — events like 9/ 11 illuminate our memories like the camera’s flash because of the amygdala, a group of nerve cells in the front of the temporal lobe that plays a key role in linking the perception of objects and situations with their emotional significance.
Other sections cover what happens when things go wrong — brain injuries and diseases, concussions, spinal cord injuries — and how they affect the autonomic nervous system and can have such devastating consequences.
There is an in- depth section, too, on drugs and their effect on the brain: both legal ones like anesthetics, analgesics, antidepressants, alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes as well as the legally murky such as cannabis, hallucinogens, anabolic steroids and synthetics.
This volume is so much more than a beautifully illustrated coffee table book, it is both fascinatingly detailed and extraordinarily readable. No reference library, or lover of good books, should be without a copy.