The Joy of Finishing

I am procrastinating going out for a run, because it's intensely hot outside. If I don't go, though, I'll get the fidgets. More about fidgeting later. In the meanwhile, I'll continue to procrastinate by telling you about how I just finally finished reading this book, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--And How It Changed the World, by Carl Zimmer, frequent NYT contrib, and ScienceBlogger.

A few random pieces of take-home from the book, which focused on a 17th-century physician named Thomas Willis, who did a lot of work on brains back when their function was *extremely* poorly understood, coined the term 'neurology,' and wrote a book on the nervous system illustrated by none other than Christopher Wren, to whom there is a lot more than steeples, apparently.

1) Quakers are incredibly interesting. I want to read a whole book about Quakers next.

2) Our modern understanding of neurology is built on a heap of dead animals, particularly dead dogs. I could not help but be struck by the dog body-count in these pages.

3) Speaking of bodies, it's nothing short of amazing what they could do -- what one can do -- to bodies using really crude means. Open up a dog, change something around, see what happens. The scientists and doctors Zimmer describes work on bodies, especially animal bodies, as if they're cars or something. The surprising thing is how often their super-crude interventions work.

4) They put a bird in a vacuum, which is just cruel and gross.

5) But speaking of cruel and gross, one interesting thing that got touched on is how, in the course of doing all this research on animals, Willis and others came to appreciate how animals and humans are kind of similar, neurally. I mean, animals feel pain (der), and also have memories, feel anxiety, and other things that are familiar to us...one of the researchers in the book even had a change of heart about experimenting on dogs.