The Unsolved Problem

The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb. Basic Books, 2020, $32.00 cloth.

WE LIVE in an era of cerebromania, the silly view that we can understand our mental life much better if we take a look at the concomitant brain events as shown on a scan. Matthew Cobb will have none of this. He is refreshingly sober in his account, deflating many modern myths which have sprung up around the brain.

The idea that something was sent through nerves to the brain was a given at the time of Descartes. But finding out what that something was has meant a long journey down tortuous roads. Nerves were not hollow, so they could not function as a conduit for fluids or gases. One of the steps leading to our present view was the work of Luigi Galvani’s nephew and collaborator, Giovanni Aldini, who in 1803 demonstrated for the Royal College of Surgeons in London what an electrical discharge can bring about. He placed electrodes on the head of a man who had been hanged an hour earlier; as a result, the man opened his left eye, grimaced, and raised and clenched his right hand. The report in  read: “It appeared to the uninformed part