The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons Book Summary - The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons Book explained in key points

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The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons summary

Name: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons
Rating: 4.5 (97 reviews)
Author: Sam Kean

Sam Kean

The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness and Recovery

4.5 (97 ratings)

24 mins

Brief summary

'The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons' by Sam Kean explores the history of neuroscience through the stories of eccentric and innovative scientists, revealing the secrets of the brain and mind.

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Neuroscience

Table of Contents

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons
Summary of 11 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 11

What’s in it for me? Marvel at the brain’s mysteries.

Which parts of your brain are involved in adding two numbers or in recognizing your grandmother? Thanks to modern scanning technologies, scientists don’t need to break out a scalpel or even ruin your hairdo to find out. They simply make you lie down in a tube-shaped scanner, switch it on and ask you to do some tests as it runs. Then the scanner’s computer translates the results into colorful images that look just like snapshots of your brain in action.

But things haven’t always been this easy. For centuries, many of our brains’ secrets were hidden in the dark of our skulls. Yet, modern neuroscience didn’t have to start from scratch. Throughout history, physicians have learned about the healthy brain by observing brain-damaged people and tying their bizarre behavior to the cerebral structures that had been injured. Portrayed in historic case studies, some of these unfortunate persons became immortal. You’ll learn more about them in these blinks. But more than that, the blinks will help you to understand the intricate and wondrous workings of your own brain.

You’ll also find out

why some people can see with their ears;
about liars who can truthfully blame their dishonesty on a vitamin deficiency; and
about people who want to divorce their own hand.

Much of our knowledge about the brain comes from studying the victims of brain damage.

Throughout most of our history, scientists couldn’t see what was happening in people’s heads without drilling a hole into their skulls. That’s why the pioneers of neuroscience learned about the brain mostly by studying individuals with brain damage.

People with brain disorders often perceive the world oddly or behave in unusual ways. Woodrow Wilson, for example, lost the ability to notice things to his left after he suffered a stroke in 1919.

Early neuroscientists often conducted their research by performing autopsies on people with brain damage after they died. Autopsies often revealed damage to specific brain regions, so researchers could ascertain what activities those regions were responsible for, based on the person’s unusual behavior.

The famous 1559 autopsy of King Henri II of France was the first breakthrough in this field. It showed that post-mortem examinations could provide us with deeper insight into the inner workings of the brain.

Henri had suffered a severe blow to the forehead during a joust. He was bedridden for weeks, experiencing hallucinations and painful headaches until he died.

After the king died, a surgeon named Ambroise Parè and an anatomist named Andreas Vesalius conducted an autopsy on his head – a highly contentious move at the time. This enabled them to uncover the cause of his hallucinations: the king’s skull was intact but the injury had caused swelling and tissue decay at the back of his brain.

Andreas and Vesalius’s findings helped establish the credibility of autopsies as a means of scientific research. We owe much of our knowledge about the human brain to unfortunate individuals like King Henri, and the brilliant scientists who studied their brains after their deaths.

The human brain is made up of three parts: the lower brain, the middle brain and the cortex.

A human brain might seem like nothing more than a gray lump to the untrained eye, but it’s highly organized – down to microscopic level. Let’s look at it in detail.

The lower brain sits at the brain’s base and controls basic body functions like breathing, sleeping and circulation. It stretches from the top of the spinal cord up to the brainstem and cerebellum.

Neurons and glial cells are the building blocks of the brain.

Just like the rest of your body, your brain is made up of cells. Brain cells are called neurons and they build a sensory network that spans your entire body. Neurons collect information to send back to the brain for processing and send orders from your brain out into your body.

Neurons pick up and transmit information with electrical signals. They consist of a cell body, an axon and dendrites. The dendrites extend out of the top of the cell body like branches, collecting information directly from your sensory organs or other neurons.

Neurons communicate with chemicals and form elastic connections in the brain.

Neurons translate information from the outside world into electrical signals so that our brains can process them. That’s how we have sensory experiences like taste, vision and smell.

Neurons aren’t directly connected to each other, however. There are gaps called synapses between them.

Damage to any region of the brain can have very specific consequences.

What would life be like if you couldn’t tell your mother from the supermarket cashier? People who suffer from face blindness experience that problem every day. They can see perfectly well but they can’t distinguish between faces. That’s because they have a problem in their fusiform face area (or FFA), the region of the brain located in the visual cortex of the occipital lobe that discerns between faces.

Brain disorders like face blindness can have highly specific symptoms because most neuron clusters have highly distinct specializations, like the FFA.

Our limbic system controls our emotions and helps us make rational decisions.

Have you ever started crying before you realized what was wrong? That happens because the brain sometimes generates feelings before it processes a rational thought. Feelings are highly useful: they allow you to immediately label incoming information as pleasant, unpleasant, harmless, threatening, important or unimportant.

Emotions and memories are formed in the limbic system, which is made up of other parts like the thalamus, hippocampus and amygdala.

Hormones are the brain’s chemical communication system.

The brain structures that make up the limbic system are special because they don’t communicate exclusively with neurotransmitters. They also use hormones, a class of biochemical molecules that act less quickly than neurotransmitters but are more far reaching. Hormones travel through the bloodstream rather than across neurons, and they can interact with all kinds of cells.

Hormones are released by glands in the brain and body like the thalamus, pituitary gland or amygdala. They help regulate your body functions and behavior.

The human brain is highly delicate and susceptible to all kinds of problems and malfunctions.

The human brain is so delicate that even a healthy one doesn’t always function properly. Any tiny neurological shift in the process of recording, storing, relaying or producing information can have a huge ripple effect, causing something significant like sleep paralysis, which many otherwise healthy people experience.

Ordinarily, when you sleep, many of your muscles are effectively paralyzed by your brain to stop you acting out your dreams physically. When you wake, the paralysis is lifted. During sleep paralysis, however, the brain stem – which is responsible for regulating sleep patterns – brings your dreaming brain into consciousness but fails to unfreeze the muscles. This causes a few frightening seconds or minutes in which you feel like you’re locked inside your own body.

A tiny brain structure called the hippocampus processes all three types of memory.

Can you remember your first day of school? How to tie a shoe? What about the thirteenth president of the United States? The last word of the previous blink?

The process of forming, storing and retrieving memories involves many areas of the brain, but the hippocampus is the most important one. However, we have different types of memory, and they use distinct neural networks to function.

The left and right brain hemispheres specialize in different tasks but work together.

You’ve probably heard the folk knowledge that certain people are “left-brained” while others are “right-brained”. “Left-brained” people are supposedly better at mathematics and problem-solving whereas “right-brained” people are more artistic.

There’s no such thing as a “right-brained” or “left-brained” personality, but it’s true that the right and left hemispheres of your brain specialize in different tasks.

Consciousness is a complex process that involves nearly all of your brain.

The ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the seat of consciousness. That’s why they carefully preserved it during the embalming process – while tossing out the brains.

Two-thousand five hundred years later, we now know that consciousness is seated in the brain, but we still don’t fully understand how it emerges there.

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What is The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons about?

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons (2014) is a trip into the fascinating world of the human brain via some of the strangest psychological case studies in history. Until quite recently, neuroscientists could only study the brain by analyzing the thoughts and behaviors of people with aberrant brains. Sam Kean uses these historic case studies to paint a picture of the organ that creates our emotions, personality and consciousness.

Best quote from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons

Neurons that fire together, wire together.

—Sam Kean

Who should read The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons?

Psychology and neuroscience students
Anyone who wants to understand their own mind
Anyone interested in unusual medical conditions

About the Author

Sam Kean is a contributor to numerous scientific journals, the New York Times and Psychology Today. He’s published two other bestselling science history books: The Disappearing Spoon and The Violinist’s Thumb.

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