You will also learn about people who can see with their ears, liars who feel certain that they were dishonest because of lack of a vitamin deficiency and the relationship between one’s hand and its desire to divorce. The key points will help you understand how your own brains work as well as those of others who have suffered damage to certain parts of their brains due to illness or injury. These people are portrayed in historic case studies, which will be discussed later on. In fact, it didn’t have to start from scratch because physicians had observed brain-damaged patients and tied their bizarre behavior to the cerebral structures that were damaged. Then the computer translates those results into colorful images that look like snapshots of the brain at work. They don’t need to cut open your skull or mess up your hair, they just make you lie down in a tube-shaped scanner, switch it on, and ask you to do some tests as it runs.

What parts of the brain are involved in addition and recognition? Scientists use modern scanning technologies to figure that out. He is currently working as a reporter at Science magazine and as a 2009 Middlebury Environmental Journalism fellow.1-Page Summary of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons Overview His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, The Believer, Air & Space, Science, and The New Scientist. Negative experiences can wire neurons together, too. Quotes from the tale of the two dueling neurosurgeons With the lucid, masterful explanations and razor-sharp wit his fans have come to expect, Kean explores the brain’s secret passageways and recounts the forgotten tales of the ordinary people whose struggles, resilience, and deep humanity made neuroscience possible. He weaves these narratives together with prose that makes the pages fly by, to create a story of discovery that reaches back to the 1500s and the high-profile jousting accident that inspired this book’s title. In The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean travels through time with stories of neurological curiosities: phantom limbs, Siamese twin brains, viruses that eat patients’ memories, blind people who see through their tongues. Some people couldn’t speak but could still sing. Pillars of the community became pathological liars. Parents suddenly couldn’t recognize their own children. Observers were amazed by the transformations that took place when different parts of the brain were destroyed, altering victims’ personalities. In many cases their survival was miraculous, if puzzling. Audiobook Length: 12 hours and 37 minutesĮarly studies of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike - strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, horrendous accidents - and see how victims coped.

The tale of two dueling neurosurgeons