How the secrets of the brain were uncovered in 17th century England? We take it for granted that the brain is the seat of our minds, the part of our body that is most ourselves. 500 years ago, Europeans, if they thought about the brain at all, took it much less seriously - whether it was a refrigerator or a pump, it was seen as little more than a mechanism, its only products tears and snot. Among the revolutions of the seventeenth century was a revolution on the understanding of the brain and mind. It's central figure was a 17th century Englishman called Thomas Willis. To him, we owe our modern understanding of the miracle that is the human brain, the first dissections of the skull and the word 'psychology'. Zimmer's new book tells Willis' story against the background of Civil War, regicide and Restoration. Set in London and Oxford, we see the context of Willis' researches and dissections, meet his famous friends, the founders of the Royal Society, Boyle, Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, who attended Willis' dissections and sketched the results. Few stories in the history of science are as important and fascinating - and as little-known - as this one. Carl Zimmer writes the monthly essay in the US magazine "Natural History", having inherited this position from Stephen Jay Gould.
I write books about science. Nature fascinates me, as does its history.
So far, I've written twelve books. My first book, At the Water's Edge (1999) followed scientists as they tackled two of the most intriguing evolutionary puzzles of all: how fish walked ashore, and how whales returned to the sea. It was followed in 2000 by Parasite Rex, in which I explore the bizarre world of nature's most successful life forms. In 2001 I published Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea, which was the companion volume to a PBS television series.
Soul Made Flesh, published in 2004, chronicled the dawn of neurology in the 1600s. The Sunday Telegraph calls it a "tour-de-force," and it was named a notable books of 2004 by the New York Times Book Review. In 2005, I published a short, richly illustrated introduction to the evolution our species, The Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins. Three years later I published Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. It is a biography of the best-studied creature on Earth. The Boston Globe called it "superb" and "quietly revolutionary."
To celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday in 2009, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. It is the first textbook about evolution intended for non-biology majors. The Quarterly Review of Biology called it "spectacularly successful."
In 2010 I branched out into e-books, publishing "Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind." I followed up the next year with another collection, entitled (not surprisingly) "More Brain Cuttings: Further Journeys Through the Mind." In 2011 I also published two print books: A Planet of Viruses, and Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
In addition to my books, I also write regularly about science for The New York Times, as well as for magazines including Time, Scientific American, National Geographic, Science, Newsweek, Natural History, and Discover, where I am a contributing editor. I've won awards for my work from the National Academies of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At Discover I write a monthly column about the brain and also write a blog called the Loom (blogs/discovermagazine.com/loom).
