November 21, 2012
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Neuroscience
The book I read to research this post was Brains: How They Seem to Work by Dale Purves which is a very good book. This book has an ambiguous title in that it's about prominent figures in the neuroscience field not how the brain works. I have a hopeless memory for names so I might not be able to put names to the stories. At one time it was rare to find a neuroscience faculty at a university & even rarer to find a course on the subject. Instead you did neuroscience as a part of another subject like anatomy or psychology. Nowadays of course that has changed. One experiment some neuroscientists did was to inject a patients brain with a special dye & watch the growth of connections each day which obviously wouldn't be dyed. In the 30's there was an eminent neuroscientist in germany who emigrated to england after he turned down a post that a jew had been forced to resign from. In the 60's there was a man who would become an eminent neuroscientist. He had trained as a doctor & done some training as a psychiatrist but dropped out. It was in america during the vietnam war so he was conscripted as a doctor in the army. He had mild depression because he didn't know what direction his life was taking. In the army however there were more opportunities to specialize in something than even university. He joined the peace corp & became a neuroscience specialist. I think that's a nice story because you often associate bad things with conscription & it's a bit different.
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