Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds Book

Phrenology was long ago discredited as pseudoscience, but its basic premise--that the key to people's personalities can be found by examining their brains--remains the subject of heated debate even now. In Postcards from the Brain Museum, a globetrotting tour of brain collections from Turin, Italy, to Paris to Moscow, Brian Burrell explores the long history of scientists' attempts to explain the brain's function by examining its form. Since antiquity, scientists have attempted to explain intellectual and personality traits by prodding, poking, dissecting, and examining the structures of the brain. Almost invariably, their theories have been misguided, colored by prejudice, or just plain wrong. Lord Byron's enormous brain, which weighed in at a whopping 6 pounds, was used as fodder for theories relating brain size to genius until the relatively tiny brains of Walt Whitman and Albert Einstein led later scientists to abandon that notion. From Franz Josef Gall, who first theorized that bumps on the skull corresponded to functions of the brain itself, to Cesare Lombrosio, who believed that born criminals could be identified by their "animalistic" features, the scientists Burrell introduces in Postcards are hindered by their preconceptions even as they lay the groundwork for modern neuroscience. Postcards, an articulate, thoughtful, and often hilarious history of scientists' early efforts to study the human brain, cleverly demonstrates how far the science of brain anatomy has come--and how much we have left to learn. --Erica C. BarnettRead More