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Inside the Brain: An Enthralling Account of the Structure and Workings of the Human Brain

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William H. Calvin (born 1939) is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a well-known popularizer of neuroscience and evolutionary biology (e.g., see his book The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence). George Ojemann was on the faculty of Neurological Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

The authors state in the Preface to this 1980 book, "This book, however, is not a textbook for such a course.... What this book seeks to accomplish is to convey the sense of adventure felt by those engaging in exploring the brain, to show how human intelligence arises out of the varied specializations of the brain, and to demonstrate that these specialized regions are composed of millions of individual neurons whose electrical and chemical properties can be ananyzed and understood by neuroscientists."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"(T)he brain itself is insensitive to pain or touch; it is not equipped with the skin's type of transducer nerver cells, which specialize in sensing touch."
"New neurons don't grow. Wounded neurons, however, return to duty... Indeed, with recovery after damage to language areas, there is now evidence that neurons on the other side of the brain have acquired such a secondary language function."
"If such REM deprivation is kept up night after night, the subject's daytime performance will deteriorate much more than if the awakening had occurred in deep sleep. But why we need REM sleep, with its dreaming, is unknown."
"Although the mechanisms in the brain underlying emotion are still not entirely clear, some features are known. The areas of brain where damage alters emotional responsiveness seem to be the same brain sites concerned with visceral function... There is indeed a relation betwen emotion and 'butterflies in the stomach.'"