It's just a small emptiness, a tiny lacuna.

Dr. William Beecher Scoville, the writer's grandfather

The Brain That Changed Everything by Luke Dittrich, cont'd

Esquire, November 2010

"And what's true of individual brains is true of brain collections as well. With his Brain Observatory, Annese is setting out to create not the world's largest but the world's most useful collection of brains. Each specimen will, through a proprietary process developed by Annese, be preserved in both histological and digital form, at an unprecedented, neuronal level of resolution. Unlike Brodmann's hand-drawn sketches, Annese's maps will be three-dimensional and fully scalable, allowing future neuroscientists to zoom in from an over-head view of the hundred-billion-neuron forest all the way down to whatever intriguing thicket they like. And though each individual brain is by definition unique, as more and more brains come online, both the commonalities and differences between them should become increasingly apparent, allowing, Annese hopes, for the eventual synthesis of the holy grail of any neuroanatomist: a modern multidimensional atlas of the human mind, one that conclusively maps form to function. For the first time, we'll be able to meaningfully and easily compare large numbers of brains, perhaps finally understanding why one brain might be less empathetic or better at calculus or likelier to develop Alzheimer's than another. The Brain Observatory promises to revolutionize our understanding of how these three-pound hunks of tissue inside our skulls do what they do, which means, of course, that it promises to revolutionize our understanding of ourselves."

"I remember following my grandfather up a hill. He was usually a sharp dresser--a New York Times reporter once described him as "almost unreal in his dashing appearance"-- but on that particular morning I believe he wore a simple gray scarf, a floppy blue hat, and a threadbare ski suit. He was hauling a wooden toboggan behind him. It was either Christmas or Thanksgiving, one of the two holidays when the whole family would get together at his artifact-stuffed house in Farmington, Connecticut. I don't remember the slide down the hill, just the walk up.

I remember midway through one Christmas dinner, maybe his last one, when he pushed himself up from his chair at the head of the table, wandered back to his study, and came back a few minutes later with a crumpled bullet in his hand. He placed the slug down beside his plate, told us the story behind it. Stamford, Connecticut, turn of the century, a burglar breaks into the home of a young bachelor. The bachelor keeps a pistol by his bedside table but his pistol jams. The burglar's doesn't. A bullet enters the bachelor's chest, where it encounters a deflecting rib, skids away from a lucky heart. The bachelor survives and keeps the bullet as a memento. He eventually passes it down to his son.

The bullet just sat there, for the rest of the dinner, beside my grandfather's plate, and like some of the other artifacts in his home, it was both fascinating and terrible to contemplate. Had it found its target, had its aim been true, then my grandfather, his children, his children's children, most of the people sitting around the table, myself included, would have never existed. It was a matter of centimeters, a fluke of aim, bone, ballistics, and it had made all the difference, its repercussions rippling down through generations."

"Annese puts the slide on a rack to dry, and I look at at again, at the blank spot near the middle, the hole you can see right through. It's just a small emptiness, a tiny lacuna. A matter of centimeters. A beginning and an end."

Luke Dittrich. What a great writer! And what a fascinating article that flowed well and ended with the perfect conclusion. The complexity of the human body, and especially the brain, is one thing I sometimes wish I had the intelligence to study and really understand. Dittrich did a great job of recounting the history of his grandfather's experiment and explaining the parts of the human brain relevant to the story and how they function.

The human mind must contain at least two separate and independent memory systems

The Brain That Changed Everything by Luke Dittrich, cont'd.

Esquire, November 2010

"She asks him to trace the star. It's a hard task for anyone, with any sort of brain, though after awhile, with practice, people with normal brains tend to improve their results, mastering the necessary counterintuitive muscle movements. The first time Henry tries it, he does it a little better. And the next time better still. With each new attempt, he never remembers ever having attempted it before, but soon he's completing the task as well as anyone. Even Henry recognizes the strangeness of this.

"I thought this would be difficult," he says to Milner after tracing the star almost perfectly, "but I seem to have done this well."

In 1962, Milner arrives at another simple but revolutionary conclusion: Since Henry is incapable of consciously remembering the events he's living through but seems to be able to unconsciously remember how to perform certain physical tasks, the human mind must contain at least two separate and independent memory systems. The world of memory science is upended again."

"For example, Henry's inability to recall postoperative episodes, an amnesia that was once thought to be complete, has revealed itself over the years to have some puzzling exceptions. Certain things have managed, somehow, to make their way through, to stick and become memories. Henry knows a president was assassinated in Dallas, though Kennedy's motorcade didn't leave Love Field until more than a decade after Henry left my grandfather's operating room. Henry can hear the incomplete name of an icon--"Bob Dy..."--and complete it, even though in 1953 Robert Zimmerman was just a twelve-year-old chafing against the dead-end monotony of small-town Minnesota."

"He's an old man now, overweight, wheelchair-bound, largely incommunicative. Lately Henry's creeping decrepitude has itself suggested some new experiments. During another meeting, Corkin quizzed Henry on how old he thought he was. He guessed that perhaps he was in his thirties. Then she handed him a mirror.

"What do you think about how you look?" she asked while he stared at himself.

"I'm not a boy," he said eventually."

Many of the items looked like they belonged in a cabinet of curiosities

The Brain That Changed Everything by Luke Dittrich

Esquire, November 2010

"My grandfather's home was full of curious artifacts, each with its own story. He traveled a lot, all over the world, and always came home with something new and strange. It was a lifelong occupation: In the mid-1920s, he'd taken what was in those days a very unusual trip to China and ended up paying some of his college tuition by selling the exotic jewelry he brought back to the States. Many of the items in his home looked like they belonged in a cabinet of curiosities. There was a carved wooden totem hanging on one wall of his dining room, some sort of pagan king or god. It was maybe three feet tall, had a soulful, mournful expression. One Thanksgiving, when I asked where it came from, I was told he'd received it during a trip to South America, perhaps in gratitude for some operation he'd performed there. The carving had apparently once been an object of worship, owing mainly to the fact that it would, at times unpredictable, weep, drops of water streaming from its eyes. Did seasonal moisture variations and the way the wood responded to them cause the tears? Probably. That or magic. My grandfather had appreciated the totem's beauty but was unsentimental about its emotions. When he brought it home, he had someone polish it before he hung it on the wall. It never cried again."

"The operation was crude--the surgeon would drive a skinny ice pick up through the thin bone behind his patient's eyeballs, then quickly swish the pick back and forth, cutting a messy swath through the frontal lobes--but it was inarguably effective at transforming otherwise difficult and uncontrollable individuals into placid, carefree creatures."

This excerpt made me cringe. And all I could think was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

"In 1848, an explosion drives a steel tamping bar through the skull of a twenty-five-year old railroad foreman named Phineas Gage, obliterating a portion of his frontal lobes. He recovers, and seems to possess all his earlier faculties, with one exception: The formerly mild-mannered Gage is now something of a hellion, an impulsive-shit-starter. Ipso facto, the frontal lobes must play some function in regulating and restraining our more animalistic instincts."