THE ECSTATIC TRUTH OF ROMANTIC NEUROSCIENCE By Stuart Trenholm *** The Montréal Review, July 2024 |
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Head Ache (2008) by Helen Pynor. Installation photograph: Danny Kildare
Painting the brain by numbers
During the Second World War, Dan Robbins worked in the maps division of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Following the war, he shifted his focus to a different kind of map. At the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit, Michigan, Robbins drew inspiration from the story that Leonardo da Vinci taught his apprentices to paint using numbered patterns on canvas. This gave Robbins the idea for paint-by-numbers kits. Simply applying paint from numbered wells to corresponding numbered areas on a canvas—following the canvas’ map, that is—even the most inexperienced painter could now produce relatively elaborate works of art (“Every Man a Rembrandt,” as a slogan went). Over the next several years, under various brand names including Craft Master, millions of paint-by-numbers kits would be sold. This method of reducing a complex picture into distinct subunits, assembled in a precise spatial arrangement, had a lot in common with how scientists were trying to make sense of that most complex of organs: the brain. *** On Wednesday March 6, 1805, anatomist Franz Joseph Gall—whose three passions in life were “science, gardening, and women”—left Vienna on a speaking tour with his assistant Johann Spurzheim. Over the next weeks, Gall would display his collection of human skulls and brain molds to enthralled audiences. As a child, Gall had wondered if the varied predilections of his classmates were predetermined. After finishing medical school, he began research that sought to prove that different parts of the brain controlled different aspects of our personalities and abilities. Phrenology, as it would become known, taught that personality traits were apparent in the (overly large or small) size of specific brain regions, and that this could be read out, in classic physiognomic style, by external measurement of the skull. Gall divided the skull, and thus the underlying brain, into numerous different functional regions. Gall was not the first to parcellate the brain into distinct functional units. While many early civilizations considered the heart as the seat of the mind, by the Middle Ages the brain was increasingly viewed as the location of mental faculties. However, many didn’t assign mental processing to brain tissue itself, but to the ventricles—the compartments where cerebrospinal fluid is produced—with different ventricles thought to serve distinct mental functions. In 1870, neurologist Eduard Fritsch and anatomist Gustav Hitzig performed electrical stimulation and lesion studies on dogs at Fritsch’s home in Berlin and provided the first definitive evidence of localization of brain function, discovering motor cortex. They identified parts of the brain that, when electrically stimulated, caused specific body parts to move, and when lesioned impaired movement of these same body parts. Soon after, David Ferrier, a Scotsman working at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Yorkshire, replicated this work in non-human primates. It was only a matter of time before somebody tested if this work translated to humans. The first attempt did not go well. On Monday January 26th, 1874, Mary Rafferty, a 30-year-old woman of Irish descent, was admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, where she came under the care of Dr. Roberts Bartholow. She presented with a five-centimeter-wide hole in her skull, apparently due to a cancerous ulcer at the location where, as a child, she had burned her head. Electricity was a novelty at the time, and it was becoming fashionable to shock people to treat various ailments. The Good Samaritan Hospital was part of the emerging electrotherapy field, and Bartholow was a proponent who would go on to write a book titled Medical Electricity. Bartholow saw in Mary Rafferty a perfect opportunity. He could advance electrotherapy while also testing for electrical excitability of the human brain. After receiving permission from Rafferty, whom Bartholow described as “rather feeble-minded,” he proceeded to test the effect of different types of electrical stimulation on Mary’s brain. On the first day, after some initial success driving limb movements via cortical stimulation, Bartholow turned up the current in order to “develop more decided reactions.” This provoked clonic spasms in Rafferty’s arm, and led to distress and crying, followed by a 30-minute loss of consciousness which included convulsions. Being a man of science, Bartholow persevered. Once Rafferty came to, he continued stimulation experiments, but at a lower current. Two days later, Bartholow set out to run further experiments, but Rafferty’s condition had deteriorated so they postponed the day’s work. She died soon afterward, and Bartholow published a paper on electrical excitability of the human brain. After the rocky start, which provoked understandable ethical concerns, it took some time before others tried electrical brain stimulation in humans. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century, building on the work of neurosurgeons Fedor Krause and Harvey Cushing, that Wilder Penfield mastered a procedure of electrically stimulating the brain of patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy treatment. At the Montreal Neurological Institute, a patient was first screened to get an idea of which part of the brain their epilepsy might be originating from. Then, under local anesthesia, a large portion of the skull was opened, and electrical stimulation was performed at various brain locations in hopes of stimulating a seizure, which would help identify the pathological tissue needing removal. Since the patient was conscious throughout the procedure, the brain itself lacking pain receptors, the patient could report the sensations evoked by stimulation of different sites of their brain. Penfield and his surgical team placed little numbered tickets at each stimulated site, literally painting the brain by numbers. In doing so, Penfield generated the most detailed functional map of the human brain to date.
Writing the world into existence
On one hand, science is a cold, calculating, objective process that is only concerned with facts. On the other hand, science is performed by human beings within the confines of human culture, with all its varying mores, biases and baggage. All things considered, it is amazing that anything approaching a pure scientific method is even possible. It wasn’t until the 16th and 17th centuries that science, as we now understand it, became a somewhat standardized process, performed by increasing numbers of people and resulting in a quickened pace of discoveries. However, once this so-called scientific revolution was afoot, there was an immediate issue: how to report experimental findings in a truthful but compelling way. David Wooton, in his persuasive telling of the scientific revolution, The Invention of Science, describes how early scientific findings were often written in a way that now seems a little strange. Wooton provides a writing example from Johannes Kepler—of planetary motion fame—which includes a full account of a dinner he and his wife had, along with a description of their dinnerware. Wooton relates this to the idea of the reality effect, which amounts to a set of literary tricks that can involve providing many details about real things that are unrelated to the point being argued, but are included to give the reader a feeling that what they are being told is authentic. Today, science writing has matured into a standardized literary form. However, while it may appear to be a highly regimented, objective literary format, modern science writing is also very focused on something that is not particularly objective: storytelling. “Scientists can take advantage of this basic human desire by incorporating elements of storytelling when they prepare articles,” writes neuroscientist Joshua Sanes in an essay advocating for storytelling in scientific writing. Other well-known neuroscientists, including Konrad Kording and Matteo Carandini, provide similar advice: “Tell a complete story in the abstract;” “Strive to organize your figures so that they tell the whole story.” Why is there such an insistence on storytelling in modern science writing? If science writing is now a standardized process, and most readers don’t need to be actively convinced that what is being described was really done, why do we still need literary tricks? In part, the focus on narrative in contemporary science writing stems from the nature of modern scientific publishing, where scientists need to publish in high impact journals to help secure grants and advance their careers. This incentivizes scientists to write electrifying copy, with a compelling narrative, and even some suspense. However, the obsession of storytelling in modern science writing is also a general sign of the times. In Seduced by Story, literary critic Peter Brooks—following up on one of his books written 40 years earlier, Reading for the Plot, which advocated for the importance of storytelling in human communication—writes of the explosion of story as a communication device in the 21st century, which has taken over all aspects of life, from politics, to news, to branding: “It was as if a fledgling I had nourished had become a predator devouring reality in the name of story.”
Just my imagination (running away with me)
It’s hard to prove something exists if you can’t see it. In the mid-to-late 17th century, to get a leg up on his competition, Antonie Van Leeuwenhook, a Dutch drape maker—rumored to be portrayed in a couple paintings by Jan Vermeer—was looking to improve the quality of his threads. To this end, he designed and handcrafted high-quality single-lens microscopes to examine his materials. Fortunately, he did not limit his magnified viewing exclusively to drapes. By looking at pond water, he discovered microbes. By looking at semen, he found sperm. In a letter he wrote to the Royal Society of London, he noted that he obtained the latter “without sinfully defiling myself… as a residue after conjugal coitus.” The finding of sperm would lead a colleague of Van Leeuwenhook’s, Nicolaas Hartsoeker, to imagine that sperm might contain miniature humans, or homunculi, that simply grew larger in the womb. Around the same time, Robert Hooke, working in Oxford, looked at cork under his microscope and was the first to identify cells, the individual units now known to be the building blocks of all organisms. With good quality microscopes becoming increasingly available, people started turning their magnified viewing to the brain. However, progress was slow, since even under the microscope it was hard to make much sense of brain tissue, built from opaque and densely packed cells with endlessly branching processes. It would require the development of specialized tissue staining techniques to help make out the trees for the forest within the brain. The most influential staining process was developed by Italian biologist Camillo Golgi, which involved applying silver nitrate to brain tissue, and resulted in sparse yet clear labelling of brain cells. From what he saw in stained brain tissue, Golgi thought that neurons were fused with one another, which led him to conclude that the entire brain worked holistically to process information. Golgi’s staining method would subsequently be used by Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who generated much sparser labeling of neurons, allowing him a clearer view of individual brain cells. Ramón y Cajal was born in the Spanish town of Petilla de Aragón in 1852. As a child, he was close with his mother, but often butt heads with his father, an anatomy teacher who worked at the local university. The young Ramón y Cajal had a problem with authority and moved from school to school due to behavioral issues. His father pushed him into short-lived apprenticeships as both a shoemaker and a barber. When Ramón y Cajal was a teenager, his father would take him to graveyards to source human remains which would be used for anatomical studies, inspiring Santiago to pursue medical training. He graduated from medical school in 1873 from the University of Zaragoza, and then received a PhD in 1878 from the University of Madrid. He would go on to hold the position of professor at several Spanish institutions, ending his career in Madrid. When Ramón y Cajal looked at neurons under his microscope, he was mesmerized. He saw that neurons were polarized structures: one end designed to receive inputs and the other end designed to send outputs. In addition, neurons in a given brain region tended to exhibit distinct morphologies, with each cell type appearing to make specific local and long-range connections to other brain regions. And if he looked at a developing brain or a damaged brain, he saw what he thought amounted to neurons sending out processes to take over new territories. As such, he argued that individual neurons were the brain’s basic processing units, with information flowing from cell to cell, in series. This would become known as the Neuron Doctrine and help earn Ramón y Cajal a Nobel Prize in 1906, which he shared with Golgi, though the two used their acceptance speeches to promote their strongly differing views of how the brain works.
Writer’s retreat
On a warm New York day in the spring of 1924, Wilder Penfield, his wife Helen, and their children boarded the S.S. Rousillon headed for Spain. They would land in Viga and from there take the train to Madrid. Wilder’s plan was to learn brain staining methods under the tutelage of Ramón y Cajal. In reality, Penfield would meet with Ramón y Cajal only a couple times during his visit. Instead, he would spend most of his time with Pio del Rio-Hortega, a pupil of Ramón y Cajal’s who had built upon the Golgi staining method to study glia—Greek for glue—the non-neuronal cells of the brain, which Penfield was interested in at the time due to their connection to inflammation following brain damage and surgery. Wilder Penfield was born in 1891 in Spokane, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. His father was a physician, but struggled to become successful and abandoned the family when Wilder was eight years old. Penfield’s mother then raised Wilder and his siblings by herself. Wilder would remain close to her throughout his life. He received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, where he played on the football team. After receiving a Rhodes Scholarship, he moved to Oxford to study neuropathology with Charles Sherrington, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for work on reflex circuits. Penfield then graduated from medical school at Johns Hopkins. He practised and studied medicine in various locales, but it was while working in New York that he came to the attention of David Rockefeller, who decided to endow an institute where Penfield could study treatments for epilepsy. Eventually, Penfield founded the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he would spend the rest of his career. In Penfield’s description of his first meeting with Ramón y Cajal, the Spaniard is initially pensive, moody and cynical, but eventually opens up, and despite Penfield’s struggles with Spanish, the two had a pleasant dialogue. Over the following years, Penfield became an important international advocate for Ramón y Cajal’s work, publishing a biographical piece in the 1920s, and writing an obituary for Ramón y Cajal in 1934. However, it’s unclear if Penfield was aware that outside of his scientific work, Ramón y Cajal had also published a book of short stories. Furthermore, it’s doubtful that Penfield anticipated that later in life he himself would go on to write not one, but two novels. In other words, the founding fathers of neuroscience were moonlighting as fiction writers. *** Ramón y Cajal wrote constantly throughout his life, including scientific articles, essays, and fiction. As a youth, he wrote a Robinson Crusoe style book. At the age of 20, around the time he completed medical school, he wrote and illustrated a Jules Verne inspired novel about a man who lands on Jupiter only to find it populated by giants. In the manner of Fantastic Voyage or The Magic School Bus, the protagonist injects himself into a giant to explore its body. Neither of these works has been preserved. A few years later, he wrote a series of science fiction short stories. He would only publish a few of them in his lifetime, most in a collection titled Vacation Stories in 1905. Vacation Stories opens with “Secret Offense, Secret Revenge,” a tale of love, lust, and jealousy. The action opens on Dr. Max Forschung, a brilliant and successful middle-aged German bacteriologist (for the literal-minded reader, forschung means “research” in German), as he marries Emma Sanderson, a young American working in his lab. Unfortunately, their marital bliss soon fades. Dr. Forschung is too focused on his research to give Emma sufficient attention. He begins to suspect that Emma is having an affair with Heinrich Mosser, his laboratory assistant. Through a series of observations and experiments, Dr. Forschung convinces himself of their infidelity: first, he finds two intertwined hairs on a couch in the lab, one consistent with Emma’s hair and the other consistent with Heinrich’s hair; second, he installs a motion recording device on the lab couch, and uses this to measure the weight of one, then two, bodies getting on, followed by vigorous oscillatory motions; third, he infects Mosser with tuberculosis, takes care to note when sores begin developing on Heinrich’s face, and pays close attention as sores develop soon afterward on Emma. Forschung shuttles the lovers off to a Swiss sanitorium where Heinrich succumbs to consumption. Emma writes Max a letter apologizing for her infidelity, so he arrives at the sanitorium and provides her with a cure that he has personally developed. With Emma’s health restored, the couple briefly resumes a happy life together until Max realizes that he is rapidly starting to look like an old man, whereas Emma has many youthful and attractive years remaining. His concern grows that she will again become unfaithful. To remedy the imbalance in their appearances, the man of science creates a tonic that he administers to Emma—without her awareness—that makes her look much older. Emma then exchanges the lab for the home, bears Forschung children, and all is well. Vacation Stories continues with “Fabricator of Honour,” which introduces us to Dr. Alejandro Mirahonda, who, to prove the power of suggestion over the human mind, convinces the city of XCV that he can inoculate them against immorality. He provides them with a placebo and achieves remarkable success. “Accursed House” tells the story of a young man, Julián, as he seeks to become wealthy before marrying his beloved Inés. Finding a beautiful, abandoned house on a large property, Julián discovers it is empty due to a series of misfortunes that fell upon the previous owner. Being a man of science, Julián does not buy into the superstitious explanations for these previous catastrophes. Instead, he uses a rational approach to address the different issues afflicting the property—it turns out the problems arose from multiple completely unrelated lethal bacterial outbreaks on the property. He then uses his ingenuity to employ modern approaches to farming and factory work, finally obtaining success, wealth and Inés. In “Corrected Pessimist,” we meet Juan Fernández, a young intellectual. Failing in his initial attempts to achieve success and renown as a scientist, he becomes increasingly cynical, which leads to a break between him and his betrothed, the beautiful Elvira. At the lowest part of his depression, a spirit appears to Juan and provides him with a thousand-fold magnified vision for one year. Juan uses his superpower to make discoveries and publishes many scientific breakthroughs. Ironically, since other scientists do not have his magnified vision, they are unable to verify his results and so all his work is for nought. Upon regaining normal vision, Juan realizes that he has to apply himself in a more serious manner to obtain the respect of colleagues and make real scientific advances. Vacation Stories concludes with “Natural Man and Artificial Man,” which presents us with a dialogue between two old acquaintances meeting for the first time in many years. One man is distraught. His wife is leaving him. He has come to the realization that he has led a life dictated by non-critical thinking while being a voice of the patrician, religious and political status quo. The other man is a successful self-made man of science and engineering, who endlessly espouses the merits of critical thinking and studying nature (intermixed with some unfortunate antisemitism). In Ramón y Cajal’s fiction, the writing tends to be preachy and heavy-handed. Recurring themes include: a male scientist who uses his intellect, hard work, and commitment to rational thought to solve problems; microscopes; bacteria; the possibility for science to raise humanity above its base instincts; a woman as a prize once the protagonist succeeds in his quest. The writing is sexist, but likely par for the course at the time. In fact, regarding the importance of a woman in the life of a male scientist, in a non-fiction book by Ramón y Cajal, Advice to a Young Investigator, he states that “the man of science should be married.” He proceeds to characterize different types of women and discusses the suitability of each type for the man of science: The intellectual (the best option, but not available in Spain due to its education system); The rich heiress (not a great option as she has too many social commitments, and anyways, she probably wouldn’t allow her husband to use her wealth on his research); The artist (another bad option—she is too difficult, too theatrical, too “masculine”); The professional woman (this is the only reasonable option for a man of science). *** In contrast to Ramón y Cajal’s moralizing science fiction tales, Penfield’s fiction is of a completely different flavour. Penfield’s two novels, No Other Gods (1954) and The Torch (1960) are works of historical fiction. No Other Gods tells the story of Abraham, grandfather of three major religions, in his search for the one true God, and a wife. Wilder got the idea for the book from his mother, who on her deathbed asked Wilder to complete a manuscript she had written. The Torch, in turn, is focused on the life and loves of Greek physician Hippocrates. Both novels feature a remarkable similarity in their plots: the formative years of a man whose impact will be felt for years to come, with the story ending just as the plot reaches the point where the protagonist is set to embark on the work for which he will be recognized throughout posterity (which, incidentally, is exactly how Penfield plotted his autobiography No Man Alone, which ends with the founding of the Montreal Neurological Institute just as Penfield is about to do the work for which he will be most remembered); the struggle to find one’s true calling (also strongly featured in his autobiography); the protagonist’s gradual realization that he has found his one true love, despite being confused by a second female character whose sensuality stirs up strange feelings (no mention of this in his autobiography, but one can imagine…); a dramatic wrestling scene replete with descriptions of beautiful male bodies. In contrast to Ramón y Cajal’s staid prose, Penfield’s writing has flourishes. Whereas Ramón y Cajal’s approach borders on proselytizing, Penfield’s method is to slowly excavate past civilizations to uncover what makes a man a man.
Ecstatic truth and romantic science
Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, author, and one of the most impactful popularizers of neuroscience. Almost single-handedly he took the case history and turned it into a popular literary genre. Taking an individual with a unique and remarkable neurological issue, instead of simply outlining the scientific basis for the issue at hand, he was able to humanize the patient and bring them back into the fold of a wider humanity that now included additional forms of existence. Part of his power stemmed from his faith in the power of the story, believing that everyone “constructs and lives a narrative” and that “this narrative is us.” He wanted medical writing to move from lists to stories, which one can see in his development as a writer from his early book Migraines, which falls largely into the list category, to his subsequent work which is more story focused. Sacks also had a complex relationship with facts: “I’m an inveterate storyteller, and I tell many, many stories. Some comic, some tragic. I was about to say, ‘some true, some untrue.’ Sometimes a little tuning here and there.” Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933. His parents were doctors. Sacks was preternaturally shy, partly stemming from his face blindness (an inability to recognize faces). When Sacks was young, one of his brothers developed schizophrenia and became unstable at home, which further pushed Sacks into solitude. At the same time, he was incredibly close with his mother. But, sometimes in trying to make Oliver into a version of herself, she pushed him too far. For instance, starting when Sacks was around ten years old, his mother—a gynecologist and surgeon—would bring home stillborn babies and have Oliver dissect them. His psyche was further bruised when at the age of eighteen he told his father that he was gay. His father shared the news with Sacks’ mother, who informed Oliver that he was an “abomination.” This prompted Sacks, after receiving a medical degree from Oxford, to move to the United States, where he would train as a neurologist. He would live in the United States for the rest of his life. He went through an initial period of heavy drug use and risky living in the United States before slowly settling into a role as neurologist, popular science writer, and public intellectual. Sacks started his literary career around the age of twenty, when he ghostwrote his mother’s medical book about menopause, Women of Forty. Sacks claimed it sold over 200,000 copies. A few years later, Sacks began publishing a series of articles and books in which he explained what it was like to experience the world in different ways, resulting from different neurological issues. Despite his influence, there were certain occasions where his “tuning” of the truth got him into trouble. Sacks’ friend Lawrence Weschler, in his biography And How are You, Dr. Sacks? recounts a few such examples from Sacks’ early career as a writer. During the writing of perhaps his most famous piece, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the wife of the Man in question contacted Sacks to complain about some factual issues in the story about her husband. A few days later, in conversation with Weschler, a defensive Sacks stated, “I don’t tell lies, though I may invent the truth.” A few months later, coming back to this conversation, he told Weschler, “Remember… when I said I don’t tell lies but sometimes I invent the truth? Well, this was not strictly accurate. Imagine. Not invent. I should have said, ‘I imagine the truth.’” A few months later still, this time stemming from an issue with an “embellishment” Sacks made in his piece Lost Mariner, he explained, “I sometimes articulate what the inarticulate would say if they could.” Initially, many in the medical community were put off by Sacks’ qualitative methodology. Similarly, in the literary world some were bothered by what Wechsler refers to as Sacks’ “romantic science,” or what a critic from the London Review of Books called Sacks’ “existential neurology.” The idea of altering or enhancing the basic set of facts to produce something that feels more real has been described by German filmmaker Werner Herzog as “ecstatic truth.” Herzog starts his essay “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and the Ecstatic Truth” by saying that the “words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.” However, when working in the realm of ecstatic truths, the distinction between fact and fiction can easily get lost. In 2001, Sacks published Uncle Tungsten, a memoir of his childhood. In it, he recalls an episode during the Second World War when an incendiary bomb fell behind his house in London, and how he and his brothers tried, to no avail, to help their father put it out with water. In a subsequent article Sacks relays how a few months after Uncle Tungsten was published, his brother Michael informed him that he “never saw it. You weren’t there.” Sacks protested that he did indeed remember it, to which his brother told him that they were away at boarding school at the time, but that Oliver had been enthralled by a dramatic letter their older brother David had written them about the incident back home. Similarly for Herzog, in his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All, in talking about his 2016 film about the internet Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, he recounts the story of asking several people what he calls his “Clausewitz question:”
One small irony: Sacks and Herzog were friends, in part because they bonded over, of all things, their mutual love of the Oxford English Dictionary—the literary equivalent of a phone book. *** Surrounding Ramón y Cajal’s scientific work there has always been an aura of art and narrative. Charles Sherrington felt that Ramón y Cajal “treated the microscopic scene as though it were alive,” with the actions of the tiny neurons he was studying being “actuated by motives and striving and satisfactions not very remotely different from our own.” In his autobiography No Man Alone, Penfield recounts the rumour that Ramón y Cajal might not have drawn his famous neuronal reconstructions while directly at the microscope, but instead drew them later from memory. For his part, Penfield was also no stranger to the more artful side of science. Nowadays, he is largely remembered for mapping motor and somatosensory cortices in humans, as rendered so artfully with his homunculus. For a description of Penfield’s iconic little human—first drawn by Hortense Pauline Cantlie, a deaf medical illustrator from Montreal—I defer to clinician and neuroscientist Nico Dosenbach:
Penfield’s homunculus is visually compelling but a coarse abstraction of the actual scientific findings. As Penfield himself wrote, “It is a cartoon of representation in which scientific accuracy is impossible.” So, it could be said that a significant part of Penfield’s legacy as a scientist can be summarized by a positive review for his second novel The Torch that appeared in the New York Times: “It is not because Dr. Penfield understands medical practices and the medical mind that he has written an excellent book… The book is excellent because of its human story—a story that is both moving and suspenseful.” In other words, with his homunculus Penfield was able to convert his scientific findings into a compelling visual story that resonated with people. However, as Dosenbach points out, storytelling in science comes with risks. His research group, nearly a hundred years after Penfield’s first description of the homunculus, found that our understanding of motor cortex needed a significant update from the picture that Penfield painted. Things were not quite as straightforward as the homunculus let on: “Good stories are powerful, even in the nominally objective realm of science. The homunculus likely lived to the age of 90 because everyone loves a good story. The imagery of the distorted figure of the homunculus, with outsized lips and hands, was so compelling that it took on a life of its own.” *** At its annual meeting, the Society for Neuroscience—the largest professional society in the world for neuroscientists—now holds a Storytelling Session predicated on research showing that “storytelling is more effective at transmitting data than facts, and that facts alone do not change minds in the broader non-scientific community.” In other words, science now informs us that the facts it creates are ineffective at representing themselves. This begs the question: are facts still important? With essentially all recent scientific publications being digitally accessible, it has become much easier for the forensically-minded to identify cases of scientific fraud. Increasingly, examples are being found in published scientific work of manipulated figures and data, usually done in the name of enhancing the narrative. However, being discovered as a fraud is still viewed as a fatal sin for a scientist. This means that while facts that are tuned to make a compelling narrative are viewed more favorably than naked facts, there is little place for facts that are known to be fabricated. This is why people got upset with Oliver Sacks if he over-tuned a story, or Werner Herzog if his documentary storytelling was overly phantasmagoric. We want to be deceived, at least a little bit, but not misled. *** In the “Background Notes” at the end of No Other Gods, Penfield elaborates on the grey area between fact and fiction in storytelling. The novelist “may come to know the unchanging patterns of human behavior, and this knowledge constitutes in itself a basic science.” In turn, the novelist “may strive to chronicle truth with as much assurance of success as the physician and the scientist.” Somewhat poetically, the part of the brain where connections occur between neurons, and where the complicated computations take place that underlie our amazing mental abilities, is referred to as grey matter. We are still many years away from understanding all the details of what transpires in the grey matter, but with each new story we tell about it, possibly we can get a little closer to the truth.
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