Amazon.com Review

With neuroscience steadily replacing psychology, philosophy, and even religion as a model of self-understanding, it's time we take a look back at the history and meaning of this curious branch of research. Washington University historian Stanley Finger charms and invigorates the reader with Minds Behind the Brain, a look at thousands of years of brain science in the form of biographical sketches. Nineteen great scientists whose brilliant insights, determined work, and resistance to cultural expectations brought this three-pound, lumpy beige ball increasing respect--from the ancient Egyptians discarding it upon death to our own view of it as the seat of consciousness.

Ramon y Cajal, Sperry, Galen, and Descartes are among the researchers Finger chooses to illuminate. Their peers, colleagues, and times are also portrayed vividly; the unavailability of human corpses for dissection until very recently, the still-raging debate on vivisection and animal research, and religious resistance to certain findings have all worked against these men and women. Well-chosen illustrations help humanize these figures, as does the author's careful balance between depictions of research and personal lives. How did Descarte's dog figure in the philosopher's understanding of the soul? Find out in Minds Behind the Brain. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Cognitive science is now all the rage; contradictory, up-to-date hypotheses on how the mind works or doesn't work crowd bookstore shelves. It wasn't always thus. Finger (Origins of Neuroscience) complements the current vogue for brain books with a wide-ranging and detailed set of profiles reaching back to the distant past. Each chapter describes a figure or pair of figures whose ideas and treatments of the brain "dramatically changed the scientific or medical landscape." Finger points first to the Egyptian grand vizier Imhotep (c. 2600 B.C.), probable author of the ancient field medicine manual now called the "Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus"; he moves swiftly to Hippocrates, who proposed the brain as the seat of consciousness. Finger's last chapter covers the neurobiologists Roger Sperry and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who both studied nerve growth in the 1940s and '50s; Sperry later studied patients who had lost their corpus callosum, the bridge connecting the brain's two hemispheres. Changing religious beliefs, animal dissections, advancing research technologies and pure chance, Finger demonstrates, have all played roles in the advance of our knowledge about minds and brains. Although the level of explanation and detail positions this study uncomfortably between academic and popular science writing; it will, however, please readers already interested in the history of science and curious about what generations of scientists past believed, guessed or found out about the brain. (Feb.)