Mysteries Locked Inside Our Heads

“What makes us human and unique among all creatures is our brain.” So opens John E. Dowling’s “Creating Mind,” a solid, instructional book, layered and in-folded like the brain itself, with channels for both the curious layman and the more intrepid student.

Dowling himself is a former medical student, whose 35-year leave of absence to study the mystery of vision led him into the field of neuroscience and a professorship at Harvard. His book covers frequently asked questions about the architecture, mechanics and development of the brain. Current events edge their way delicately into the narrative--why did Princess Diana’s bodyguard lose all memory of the short time preceding her fatal accident, what would have happened to President Kennedy had his assassin’s bullet struck another part of the brain?

Dowling has the good sense to enlist the superior prose of the great science writers of the last few years, artists like Lewis Thomas, Oliver Sacks and Steven Pinker. Many of his chapters open with case studies described by these writers, followed by a brief, easily read paragraph of Dowling’s own, specifying the section of the brain that is relevant to the case.

Occasionally he forays deeper into literature for his anecdotes, quoting for instance David Livingstone, who in his 1857 African diary wrote about a lion attack and in the process described the effect of enkephalin, an opiate released in the brain to relieve pain.

But the bulk of each chapter contains detail of a more academic nature, requiring an exercise of the brain that is not beyond most college graduates but demands both a slower pace and a more patient mind. If you want to learn about the brain, Dowling seems to be saying, then you’re going to have to learn to use your brain.

The rewards are great. The reader comes away with the best kind of knowledge, aware of what neuroscience knows and what it doesn’t. In one section, Dowling describes a set of 1930s experiments in which the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield stimulated the brains of conscious patients (the brain has no pain receptors) in a wild topographical expedition to map cerebella incognita. The patients would hear invisible orchestras and relive memories as one or another piece of gray matter was excited.

Dannie Abse, the British physician-poet, described such an operation in his poem “In the Theatre,” in which a Welsh surgeon, blindly spelunking for a tumor, provoked a profound reaction from the patient.

Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,

that voice so arctic and that cry so odd

had nowhere else to go--till the antique

gramophone wound down and the words began

to blur and slow, “ . . . leave . . . my . . . soul . . . alone . . . “

to cease at last when something other died.

And silence matched the silence under snow.

Scientists may be able to map the brain, but they will never be able to map the soul: Leave that to the poets and philosophers.