Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds [Paperback]

Brian Burrell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2006 | ISBN-10: 0767906772 | ISBN-13: 978-0767906777

What makes one man a genius and another a criminal? Is there a physical explanation for these differences? For hundreds of years, scientists have been fascinated by this question.
In Postcards from the Brain Museum, Brian Burrell relates the story of the first scientific attempts to locate the sources of both genius and depravity in the physical anatomy of the human brain. It describes the men who studied and collected special brains, the men who gave them up, and the sometimes cruel fate of the brains themselves.
The fascination with elite brains was an aspect of the scientific mania for measurement that gripped the Western world in the mid-nineteenth century, along with a passionate interest in the biological basis of genius or exceptional talent. Many leading intellectuals and artists willed their brains to science, and the brains of notorious criminals were also collected by eager anatomists ghoulishly waiting in the execution chamber with a bag full of sharp metal tools.
Focusing on the posthumous sagas of brains belonging to Byron, Whitman, Lenin, Einstein, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, and many others, Burrell describes how the brains of famous men were first collected—by means both fair and foul—and then weighed, measured, dissected, and compared; exhaustive studies analyzed their fissural complexity and cell or neuron size.
In various cities in Europe, Russia, and the United States, brain collections were painstakingly assembled and studied. A veritable who’s who of literary, artistic, musical, scientific, and political achievement waited in Formalin-filled jars for their secrets to be unlocked.
The men who built the brain collections were colorful and eccentric figures like Rudolph Wagner, whose study of the brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss led to one of the great scientific debates of the nineteenth century. In America, the Fowler brothers brought phrenology to the United States and made a convert of Walt Whitman, whose brain was donated to science and disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Eventually, this project was abandoned, and with the discovery of new technologies the study of the brain has moved on to a higher plane. But the collections themselves still exist, and today, in Paris, London, Stockholm, Philadelphia, Moscow, and even Tokyo, the brains of nineteenth century geniuses sit idle, gathering dust in their jars. Brian Burrell has visited these collections and looked into the original intentions and purposes of their creators. In the process, he unearths a forgotten byway in the history of science—a tale of colorful eccentrics bent on laying bare the secrets of the human mind.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Phrenology was long ago discredited as pseudoscience, but its basic premise--that the key to people's personalities can be found by examining their brains--remains the subject of heated debate even now. In Postcards from the Brain Museum, a globetrotting tour of brain collections from Turin, Italy, to Paris to Moscow, Brian Burrell explores the long history of scientists' attempts to explain the brain's function by examining its form. Since antiquity, scientists have attempted to explain intellectual and personality traits by prodding, poking, dissecting, and examining the structures of the brain. Almost invariably, their theories have been misguided, colored by prejudice, or just plain wrong. Lord Byron's enormous brain, which weighed in at a whopping 6 pounds, was used as fodder for theories relating brain size to genius until the relatively tiny brains of Walt Whitman and Albert Einstein led later scientists to abandon that notion. From Franz Josef Gall, who first theorized that bumps on the skull corresponded to functions of the brain itself, to Cesare Lombrosio, who believed that born criminals could be identified by their "animalistic" features, the scientists Burrell introduces in Postcards are hindered by their preconceptions even as they lay the groundwork for modern neuroscience. Postcards, an articulate, thoughtful, and often hilarious history of scientists' early efforts to study the human brain, cleverly demonstrates how far the science of brain anatomy has come--and how much we have left to learn. --Erica C. Barnett --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. When scientists first began probing the human mind, it was commonly believed that the brain itself could provide insight to an individual's mental capacities. Though fields like phrenology—analyzing the brain from the shape of the skull—have been discredited, Burrell (Damn the Torpedoes) reminds us that modern neuroscience shares many of the same preoccupations, including the central notion that the brain contains markers for mental and physical conditions. His history is therefore less a chronicle of quackery than a sympathetic account of scientific innovators whose ideas didn't quite pan out. Anthropologist Cesare Lombroso's theories in the 19th century about the criminal brain, for example, have never been entirely abandoned, and Burrell considers why it was so appealing to many Europeans of the time. Though such proto-neurosurgeons dominate his tale, Burrell also focuses on some of the brilliant minds they studied. We all know Einstein's brain was saved, but how many Americans know that the KGB had a full-time guard on Lenin's dissected organ? Or that Walt Whitman donated his brain to science, only to have a clumsy researcher destroy it? Burrell cites works by Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould that have told parts of this history, and his engaging account earns a place next to these illustrious predecessors on any science reader's bookshelf.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (January 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767906772
• ISBN-13: 978-0767906777
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,595,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mind over Matter, March 16, 2005

By 

Pierre R. Hart (Etowah, North Carolina United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds (Hardcover)

Nothing so intrigues the intellect as the contemplation of itself. Yet unlike the functional relationship between other organs and their products, that between mind and brain defies satisfactory definition. As Burrell's historical survey proves, that has not deterred countless investigators from attempting to explain mental ability in terms of physical structures.
Phrenology,which remained in vogue throughout the nineteenth century, was widely exploited by charlatans but, as the author points out, it established the basic tenet of modern neuroscience: the concept of cortical localization. Although the elaborate maps of the skull, "read" by touch, only hinted at the complexity of the sensorimotor cortex, they helped to refute the concept of the mind as a unified whole. With the development of techniques for the removal and preservation of whole brains, the scientists' attention began describing the gross anatomy of that structure. Laboring under the assumption that there was some correlation between quantitatively determined properties, such as weight, and intellectual capabilities, they published numerous studies of virtually no worth.
Of particular interest were their efforts to establish the physical basis of genius. Many distinguished intellectuals would donate their own brains for postmortem analysis. Only in those instances where the investigators were persuaded of their subjects' capabilities did the results sometimes confirm a correlation between the physical and the mental. Completely objective inquiries invariably showed no correlation.With the development of sophisticated cytological techniques, the focus shifted from gross structures the the cellular level but with no change in the results.
In the course of these investigations, numerous collections of preserved brains were established, some of which still languish in various states of repair. Burrell describes several of these at length. The American Anthopometric Society's collection in Philadelphia briefly held Walt Whitman's brain, only to have it disappear unexamined. (It appears to have been shattered when dropped by a laboratory assistant.) A much different fate was in store for Vladimir Lenin's brain for which a special institute was established by the Soviet government. Sliced into a huge number of sections and initially subjected to examination by a leading specialist of the l920's, it failed to yield any characteristics to prove its possessor superior. Nor have renewed efforts by post-Soviet investigators been any more successful.
As well as the political, there have been racial and gender biases behind some of the analyses but they have met with the same failure. As Burrell concludes: "No one can look at a brain and tell what sort of person inhabited it (sic). Nor has anyone discovered a scientific basis for judging the superiority of one mind over another..." (306) Although he occasionally meanders into excessive biographical detail, the author has provided a well documented record of an exercise in futility.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A bit overly detailed and dry, May 8, 2005

By 

Ken Zirkel "Kickstand" (Somewhere in New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds (Hardcover)

I generally appreciate a good general-interest book about science and the history of science. But while this book definitely has some interesting points to make, it does get bogged down quite a bit in the very specific minutiae of the hitory of brain study. This story would make an excellent magazine article, but I think it suffers in full-length book form, and ends up being a bit too long and even (in parts) dull for the general reader.

5.0 out of 5 stars The History of Neurology from Descartes Onward, October 5, 2007

By 

Grewupon Movies "GM" (Midwest, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds (Hardcover)

Perhaps it is simply my tastes to want all the knowledge I can lay my hands on regarding the field of neurology and related disciplines. One reviewer was disappointed that this book went into too much detail about neurology's history. Frankly, this was WHY I loved the book: a convenient collection of the random odds and ends of its history, from Descartes onwards.

I don't think it was poorly written, but for someone who doesn't revel in the minutest of details, who perhaps isn't as interested in the nitty gritty background of the field, then, yes, I can see how this book wouldn't earn its five stars. For me, there are few other books I've enjoyed-- or referenced in conversation-- moreso than this book.