{"id":109242,"date":"2017-03-27T16:28:42","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T20:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109242"},"modified":"2017-03-31T16:18:29","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T20:18:29","slug":"the-hundred-trillion-stories-in-your-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/27\/the-hundred-trillion-stories-in-your-head\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hundred Trillion Stories in Your Head"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the father of modern neuroscience, cellular anatomy was like the most exciting fiction.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal, \u201cthe father of modern neuroscience.\u201d All images courtesy Cajal Legacy, Instituto Cajal (CSIC), Madrid.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fiction is, by definition, a world away from fact\u2014but Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal, often heralded as \u201cthe father of modern neuroscience,\u201d used it to find objective truth. Cajal spent his days at the microscope, gazing down at faint, entangled fibers that appeared to his fellow anatomists as inscrutable labyrinths. Contrary to prevailing theory, the Spaniard discerned that the nervous system, including the brain, comprises distinctly individual cells (neurons), which, he theorized, must communicate across the infinitesimal spaces between them (synapses). It was Cajal who first applied the term plasticity<\/em> to the brain; he went so far as to recommend \u201ccerebral gymnastics\u201d for mental enhancement, presaging twenty-first century insights and trends about brain exercise. \u201cIf he is so determined,\u201d Cajal said, \u201cevery man can be the sculptor of his own brain.\u201d If all Russian literature comes from Gogol\u2019s \u201cOvercoat,\u201d and all modern American literature comes from \u201ca book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn<\/em>,\u201d then international brain research, including grand projects like the BRAIN<\/small> Initiative and the Human Brain Project, emerges from the unlikely work of Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal.<\/p>\n

Cajal was born in 1852, high in the mountains of northern Spain; his head always seemed to belong in the clouds. The landscape of his childhood was epic. Aragonese folklore echoed through dust-colored pueblos, swept through by the specters of conquests and kings. The young Cajal idolized these legendary figures, maybe because village life was incessantly prosaic. Alto Arag\u00f3n was notoriously inhospitable; the highland region that Robert Hughes, in his biography of Goya (another native son), noted for its \u201csour wine, straw bedding, tough meat\u201d\u2014\u201csemi-troglodytic conditions.\u201d Almost nothing grew from the callous, fissured soil; Cajal\u2019s home was a ramshackle pile of cobblestone. \u201cNot a flower pot in the windows,\u201d he recalls in his autobiography, Recollections of My Life<\/em>: \u201cnot the smallest decoration on the fronts of the houses, nothing in a word, to indicate the slightest feeling for beauty.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Cajal\u2019s father was a man of facts, implacable and austere. The son of peasant farmers, he\u2019d abandoned his home at age twelve, in search of less desolate fields. He apprenticed to a lowly barber-surgeon and went on to achieve a medical degree, the triumph of a grueling life. There was no time for leisure, for distractions from the path. The human mind, Cajal\u2019s father believed, was made for obtaining knowledge. \u201cHe repudiated or despised all culture of a literary or of a purely ornamental or recreative nature,\u201d Cajal recalls. Only medical books were allowed in the house\u2014absolutely no fiction. Art, Cajal\u2019s father believed, was the symptom of a devastating illness.<\/p>\n

But Cajal\u2019s mother, a covert romantic, kept cheap fantasy novels hidden at the bottom of a trunk and smuggled them into the hands of her children, to their delight. As the local surgeon, Cajal\u2019s father was often away from home, and when he returned, his wife\u2019s \u201cexcessive softness\u201d enraged him; he was chagrined to recognize it in his son, too. He tried to eradicate the boy\u2019s literary impulses, punishing him with whips, cudgels, and other instruments of torture often seen in \u201cpenny dreadful\u201d horror tales and haunting children\u2019s nightmares.<\/p>\n

The abuse only seemed to embolden Cajal\u2019s creative instincts. \u201cWhenever I had finished supper,\u201d he recalls, \u201cI eagerly hastened to my little room and, until I fell asleep, spent my time giving form and life to the jumble of stains on the wall and the cobwebs of the ceiling, which I transformed, by the power of thought, into the wings of a magic stage, across which filed the cavalcade of my fantasies.\u201d His mind transmuted shadows into story: a perceptual trick that would later help clarify his view of even more profound obscurities.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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Cajal convinced his father that he needed a quiet room of his own in which to study. The pigeon house next to the family barn became the site of his first experiments, where he was free to imagine and explore. A window opened onto the roof of a neighbor, a pastry chef with slightly more elevated tastes. In the attic, among the sweetmeats and dried fruit, Cajal espied a smorgasbord of literary treats. He lost himself in Dumas, Hugo, Cervantes, and others. Long before peering through microscopes, Cajal trained his eyes to the pages of books. Reading novels primed his mind to explore more invisible realms.<\/p>\n

After high school, Cajal\u2019s father enrolled him in medical school, where the only subject that held his interest was anatomy. Though it had emerged decades earlier, cell theory was revolutionizing\u2014or scandalizing\u2014the field then. Reading about it, Cajal encountered literary metaphors that drew him in, such as the famous line from the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow: \u201cThe body is a state in which every cell is a citizen.\u201d Cajal\u2019s first look through a microscope confirmed this idea, showing him, in his own words, \u201ccaptivating scenes from life of the infinitely small.\u201d For twenty continuous hours\u2014or so he claimed\u2014he watched the movement of a leucocyte away from a capillary, akin, in his vivid imagination, to high-stakes escape. He even wrote and illustrated a novel about a miniature man\u2014about the size of a cell\u2014traveling through bodies of gargantuan beings on Jupiter.<\/p>\n

Cellular anatomy, for Cajal, was like the most exciting fiction. He became a researcher, setting up a makeshift laboratory\u2014not unlike the old pigeon house\u2014in his parents\u2019 attic. Later, he witnessed a demonstration of the so-called black reaction, an erratic chemical stain\u2014which other biologists had abandoned\u2014that had the power to reveal whole hidden elements beneath the discriminating light of the microscope. Cajal was stunned by the clarity of the results; the arcane forms reminded him of ink on paper. He immediately applied the technique to the nervous system\u2014the holy grail of human anatomy\u2014hoping to uncover \u201cthe material course of thought and will.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cajal modeled his scientific quest after literary heroes from his childhood. He cast himself in the mold of Crusoe, envisioning the brain as \u201ca world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and vast stretches of unknown territory,\u201d and devoting his work to \u201cislands of discovery.\u201d In 1888, working alone at the microscope in his home laboratory, Cajal observed the endpoint of a nerve fiber, a nearly imperceptible phenomenon that led him to declare that nerve cells were independent\u2014thus beginning the saga of modern neuroscience. \u201cThe job of the anatomist,\u201d Cajal writes, \u201cis to separate the apparent from the real.\u201d Like his beloved Don Quixote, he believed in an alternative view of the world; unlike Quixote, he succeeded in rallying the people around him, who eventually celebrated his foresight.<\/p>\n

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How did Cajal see what others could not? To anthropomorphize was his genius\u2014yet such an approach seemed unscientific, to say the least. \u201cCajal treated the microscopic scene as though it were alive,\u201d recalled Charles Sherrington, his lifelong friend and fellow Nobel Laureate, \u201cand were inhabited by beings which felt and did and hoped and tried even as we do.\u201d Sherrington saw that fantasy aided the unorthodox Spaniard\u2019s ability to visualize the brain. \u201cIf we would enter adequately into Cajal\u2019s thought in this field,\u201d Sherrington continues, \u201cwe must suppose his entrance, through the microscope, into a world populated by tiny beings actuated by motives and striving and satisfactions not very remotely different from our own.\u201d Cajal highlighted that subject and object\u2014the brain scientist and the neuron\u2014descended from the same evolutionary ancestor, contained the same physical material, and were beholden to the same mortal laws.<\/p>\n

The world of the infinitely small, like novels of his youth, seemed more real to Cajal than everyday existence. How else could he routinely spend up to fifteen hours a day, for almost fifty years, alone in the laboratory? He claimed to have observed a million neurons, witnessing them in every phase of their lives: birth, development, movement, relationships, adversity, trauma, decline, and death. On thumbnail sheets of dead brain tissue, the Spaniard\u2019s cherished stories came to life. He imagined neurons as protagonists in an intense cerebral drama. Their fibers \u201cgroped to find another.\u201d Their aching contacts became \u201cprotoplasmic kisses\u201d\u2014\u201cthe final ecstasy of an epic love story.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than a century after his 1906 Nobel Prize, Cajal\u2019s portraits are iconic. It might be natural to assume that these drawings are copies of what he saw through the eyepiece, like cerebral still lifes. Yet his illustrations were strikingly interpretative and deeply personal, blurring the line between abstraction and representation. After viewing many cells, Cajal distilled their features to a type. His images are composites, highlights, even exaggerations of actual neurons; I\u2019ve heard it said that he often drew from memory after taking long walks through the park. Cajal called them \u201cpieces of reality,\u201d these tactfully fictionalized depictions. Had he listened to his father, forsaking literature, he might never have recognized the truth. The human brain contains around eighty billion neurons, we now know, each of which may interact with up to ten thousand others. One might wonder: Do we tell their ephemeral stories, or do they, somehow, tell ours?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Benjamin Ehrlich is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Dreams of Santiago Ram\u00f3n Cajal<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal, \u201cthe father of modern neuroscience,\u201d visualized the brain by imagining \u201cneurons as protagonists in an intense cerebral 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