A Portrait of the Brain
Adam Zeman
Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2008
Camillo Golgi's first report of his work on neurons was titled 'Sulla strutura della griglia del cervello,' or, when translated, 'On the structure of the grey matter of the brain' (85).
Don Santiago Ramon y Cajal, a Spanish anatomist, wrote this upon discovering Camillo Golgi's method of looking at neurons:
Against a clear background stood black threadlets, some slender and smooth, some thick and
thorny, in a pattern punctuated by small dense spots, stellate or fusiform. All was sharp as a sketch
with Chinese ink on transparent Japanese paper. And to think that that was the same tissue which
when stained with carmine or logwood left the eye in a tangled thicket where sight may stare and
grope for ever fruitlessly, baffled in its effort to unravel confusion and lot for ever in twilit doubt.
Here, on the contrary, all was clear and plain as a diagram. Dumbfounded, I could not take my
eye from the microscope (87).
Experiences like deja vu lie at the fringe of consciousness, capturing one's attention just at the moment of their disappearance (120).
The problem we are travelling around, of the relation of mind to matter, tends to presuppose a polar distinction between the two, something like the radical contrast Descartes drew between 'res extensa' and 'res cogitans', extended things - objects - and thinking things - minds. If we give up Descartes' strange conception of mind cut free from matter, relinquishing the concept of the soul, we need not feel committed either to Descartes' conception of matter free of mind. The classical problem of mind and matter begins here - with the opposition of mindless matter to matterless mind. But arguably this opposition is false. The relationship of mind and matter is not oppositional but intimate and circular: mind emerges from matter, and matter is conceived by mind. The polar opposition of subject and object is also misleading, for the same reason. We can never attain complete objectivity: knowledge is always shaped by the knower. But nor will we ever enjoy pure subjectivity: knowledge always arises from and contains something of the world (192-3).
Experience is a process of skilful intelligence-gathering rather than passive reception. To perceive is always to act (196).
Further Reading:
Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology, Paul Broks
Human Traces, Sebastian Faulks
Minds Behind the Brain - A History of the Pioneers and their Discoveries, Stanley Finger
Recollections of My Life, Santiago Ramon y Cajal
Man on His Nature, Sir Charles Sherrington
