The Brain in Search of Itself, Benjamin Ehrlich
The Brain in Search of Itself, Benjamin Ehrlich
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The Brain in Search of Itself
Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron

Author: Benjamin Ehrlich

Narrator: Timothy Andrés Pabon

Unabridged: 11 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/05/2022


Synopsis

Unless you're a neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal is likely the most important figure in the history of biology you've never heard of. Along with Darwin and Pasteur, he ranks among the most brilliant and original biologists of the nineteenth century, and his discoveries have done for our understanding of the human brain what the work of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton did for our conception of the physical universe.

Benjamin Ehrlich's The Brain in Search of Itself is the first major biography in English of this figure, whose scientific odyssey mirrored the rocky journey of his beloved homeland of Spain into the twentieth century. A portrait of a nation as well a biography, The Brain in Search of Itself follows Cajal from the hinterlands to Barcelona and Madrid, where he became an illustrious figure. Cajal devised a theory that was as controversial in his time as it is universal in ours: that the nervous system is comprised of individual cells with distinctive roles.

In our age of neuro-imaging and investigations into the neural basis of the mind, Cajal is the artistic and scientific forefather we must get to know. The Brain in Search of Itself is at once the story of how the brain as we know it came into being and a finely wrought portrait of an individual as fantastical and complex as the subject to which he devoted his life.

About Benjamin Ehrlich

Benjamin Ehrlich is the author of The Dreams of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the first translation of Cajal's dream journals into English. His work has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Paris Review Daily, Nautilus, and New England Review, where he serves as a senior reader.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nelson

The book "The Brain in Search of Itself" (2022) pays a necessary tribute to an important figure of science at the beginning of the last century, the spaniard Santiago Ramón Y Cajal (1852-1934), responsible for the discovery of the basic cell of our brain, the neuron. Considered one of the fathers of......more

Goodreads review by Carmen

An intellectual journey for and from a curious mind. Ranging from the history behind brain and neural doctrine, to the insides of Cajal’s brain, adventures, and feelings. From Spanish politics to European scientific history in the 19th Century — that still explains many of the cultural aspects of Sp......more