I’ll never forget seeing the name written in black capitals on the side of the bucket: “MR TURNER." Immediately it felt personal. With two hands, I lifted Mr Turner’s brain carefully out of its plastic home and held it before me. Here I was, using my living brain to look at the dead brain belonging to a complete stranger. For a long while I just stared at it: this grey mass, so heavy, as if it were filled still with all Mr Turner’s memories and dreams.
That neuroanatomy class in London in 1999 was the peak of my dalliance with the physical stuff of brains. It was the hands-on culmination of a curiosity that had started during my undergraduate degree in psychology, which I’d finished earlier that year. During lectures on memory and emotion and language, I’d always been pre-occupied by the same thought – “but how can the meat and veins of the brain give rise to these abstract, mental entities?” Hardly an original question, but it’s what drove me to take a Masters in neuroscience, and ultimately led to that day when I held Mr Turner’s brain in my hands.
I’d believed back then that learning more about the meat and veins part of the equation might get me closer to an answer. But really that surreal day with Mr Turner’s brain only intensified the mystery. I still wonder occasionally who he was. I've never handled another brain. And in fact the research I conducted over the ensuing five years of my Masters and PhD only ever involved making inferences about what the brain was doing based on behavioural experiments with living people. After that, I left the lab and I’ve spent the last 10 years as a writer covering the latest findings, theories and controversies across psychology and neuroscience.
Today the same question still bugs me – how can the rich variety of human experience arise from a physical coagulation of blood and tissue? I’m fascinated by this intersection of the mental and physical worlds, as well as the changing ways we’ve made sense of this enigma through the ages. At a time when there is unprecedented investment and interest in brain research, I’m also intrigued by how this new knowledge and technology is changing the way we see ourselves and how we conduct our lives. There’s a constant stream of new findings, but often it seems that what reaches the public is myth and hype.
Here on Brain Watch, I hope you’ll join me as I reflect on these topics with a mixture of awe, curiosity and skepticism.
