The Neurotourist

Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science

Lone Frank

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781851688845
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Neuroscience
• Index: Biological Sciences

Discover the true heart of humanity: the brain Acclaimed journalist and intrepid brain "explorer" Lone Frank embarks on an incredible adventure to the frontiers of neuroscience to reveal how today's top scientists are reinventing human nature, morality, happiness, health, and reality itself. Interlacing bizarre experiments, cutting-edge science, and irreverent interviews, The Neurotourist is an odyssey through the mind-bending revolution underway in the new age of the brain.

1

BRAINY REVOLUTION

It’s an awkward situation. Tears are running down my face, and I’m quite sure the good-natured man on my right has noticed them, as he speaks to me. I try to blink them away, opening and closing my eyelids again and again without any apparent effect against the formaldehyde fumes wafting up from the white plastic bucket in front of me. I’m holding a human brain – half a human brain, to be exact – whilst trying to concentrate on what the man is telling me, as he gesticulates and explicates, clearly expecting some sort of reaction from me. The brain resting in my right hand is split lengthwise, revealing its knurled structures and inner cavities. There is something undignified about the way its halved cerebellum dangles over my wrist.

“You say you want to write a book about the brain. Then, I suppose a good place to start is to look at it up close. How’s your anatomy? We’ll start with the easy stuff: this thick white band is the corpus callosum. Its 200,000 transverse nerve fibers allow the two hemispheres to communicate. I call it the Brooklyn Bridge of the brain.”

It’s not the first time George Tejada has used that line, and it’s not the first brain he’s studied at close quarters. George is head technician at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, the world’s largest brain bank, and he personally handles every one of the three hundred-odd human brains that are donated each year for research and end up here in the Mailman Building at McLean Hospital in Belmont outside Boston. George is a slender, middle-aged man, dressed in basic, green hospital scrubs. His graying buzz cut and concise movements give him an air of efficiency and enterprise, but his Spanish accent softens the image a bit. All in all, a man you can trust with your donated organs.

“This is the hippocampus.” George reaches out and traces a curvature along the underside with his little finger. “This is what stores all your experiences. Without the hippocampus you’re nothing.”

Of course, in theory, I’m perfectly familiar with the function of this twisting, sausage-like structure, but I’ve never seen it before in real life. I move my face closer to the brain. I’m not really able to distinguish anything in particular in the beige mass. Actually, all I can think of is how much brain tissue reminds me of pickled mushrooms. The strong fumes make me shed a tear on the brain stem. George doesn’t see it or pretends not to. He simply turns the brain over and asks me to note how the folds on the outside of the cerebral cortex are much less full than they should be. Instead of being filled out and having an almost smooth surface, it has deep hollows that switch back and forth like a dried walnut.

“Severe atrophy.”

“Alzheimer’s?”

George nods, and I feel like an A student. The merciless progression of dementia has dissolved precious tissue and left a shrunken, compromised organ. From having been a well-functioning person – “Woman, the brain belonged to an elderly woman” – she moved deeper and deeper into a darkness without memories, without language, and finally without consciousness. Because of her illness, she ended up here in a white plastic pail with no identity other than number B6782. The Brain Bank collects diseased brains in order to send tissue samples to researchers throughout the world. From knowledge will come a cure: this slogan appears on the front page of all the Brain Bank’s pamphlets. Researchers study changes in the tissue to understand what is going on in conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disease.

“I can’t give you the exact amount off the top of my head, but it costs thousands of dollars to get a single brain through the standard procedures,” says George. And there is a professional pride in his meticulous explanation of how this sensitive organ must be removed from its former owner immediately after death and deposited with the Brain Bank within twenty-four hours.

“We always have somebody on call, always.”

Please contact the Brain Bank before the brain is removed, counsels the protocol sent out to nursing homes and hospital wards attending to a donor. Do not embalm the deceased before the brain is removed and please place the deceased in a refrigerated environment as soon as possible and no later than six hours after death has occurred. The Brain Bank will send you the necessary shipping materials.

When the chilled brains arrive at McLean, they are immediately cut into two halves. In the laboratory, there are pictures of young Lou, with a Plexiglas screen in front of his face and a big smile for the photographer, slicing through yet another bloody brain. “Notice how he moves the knife from below and upward,” George remarks. “That makes for a beautiful brain stem.”

One half goes directly into the freezer and the other is preserved in formaldehyde, suspended in the thick liquid in plastic buckets, until it is taken out and sliced into cross-sections. They are then dispatched as tissue samples to researchers who have applied to and been approved by the Bank. The brains also pass through the hands of trained pathologists, who make sure that the right diagnosis was made, and the cross-sections undergo staining and characterization. Usually, one brain arrives every day and, today, there are almost seven thousand in the repository. The Bank has been in existence since 1978 and is still contributing new knowledge. In the past, the Bank provided tissue samples that helped identify the genetic defects behind Huntington’s chorea, an incurable degenerative disease resulting from the death of certain brain cells. More recently, the director of the Brain Bank, Francine Benes, has been focusing research on schizophrenia and bipolar disease. By studying brains donated to McLean, she has ruled out a hypothesis that the two diseases have something to do with degeneration and cell death, which indicates that they may rather be associated with defective connections in the brain.

“I don’t do research myself,” says George, Yet, in his six years at the Bank his dealings with dead tissue have never become routine or everyday. He makes a sweeping gesture with both arms.

“I love my job. I never get tired of talking about it. The brain is a deeply fascinating subject for people, and it still has a powerful effect on me. You can’t help but be moved knowing that this is a person, this thing you have in your hand was a human being.”

He’s right. It’s very difficult not to be moved. Of course, a pair of rubber gloves separates me and the deceased woman’s right hemisphere, but I almost feel a tingling as if a current were running through the 700 grams of cold tissue. It’s a strange sensation, a tremulous, unsteadying and actually quite unpleasant sensation. Entirely unexpected.

“You’re a biologist!” I tell myself. “You’ve dissected everything from earthworms to rabbits without a peep. You carved up rats for years to cultivate their brain cells without a tremor. At any rate, you didn’t feel anything in particular.”

But now all my cool academic interest is gone. Standing here with the remains of B6782 almost makes me want to cry – tears that are not due to the formaldehyde. Thin, cold needles prick the flesh up and down my back, and the uneasiness releases little balls of lightning in the pit of my stomach. It is just as George says: I’m holding the very essence of a person in my hands. This massive blob was – merely a week ago and for an entire life – the innermost core of another human being. All the thoughts, feelings and unconscious desires of this person were electrical impulses ceaselessly leaping between individual cells along a delicately branching network of axons and dendrites. Fingering this tissue somehow feels like a transgression. The moment is horribly intimate.

At the same time, the surroundings and the circumstances are astonishingly mundane. The room we’re in is tiled in gray linoleum, illuminated by white neon lights, spotless and anonymous – reminiscent of a veterinarian’s clinic after the clients have all gone home. A set of steel scales hangs from the ceiling, like at a butcher’s shop. There is a row of glass-encased cabinets along the walls and a fountain pen lying parallel to a yellow notepad on one of the desks. Everything is practical and purposeful, without ornamentation. This is a workplace. And George is a man who brings your mind back to the concrete.

“Look. This is what happens when you eat too much junk food.”

He pulls the stub of an artery away from the underside of the exposed brain. It is bright yellow and doesn’t tally with the pale, diluted color scheme of the rest of the brain.

“Feel how hard it is.”

I dutifully squeeze the thick artery with two fingers and feel its hardness. Like plastic. George suddenly turns, walks to the corner and gets yet another receptacle, which opens with a snapping sound. He quickly puts his hands down in the liquid and brings up another hemisphere. He holds it next to mine; you can see that it is larger and its form fuller.

“See, that’s how a control brain is supposed to look.”

A control brain. That is, an ostensibly normal organ like the one George and I still carry around in our skulls. I put the disease-ravaged B6782 back into the viscous fluid and feel like I’m putting down a burden. George looks as if he wants to say something but simply lets a smile play on his lips.

“Apparently, the world can’t get enough of the brain.” The remark comes from the door. “We always have somebody visiting. You’ve come from Denmark. Next Tuesday, a team of researchers is coming from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and the week after that we’re getting a visit from German TV.”

Timothy Wheelock extends his hand, and I peel off my wet glove. Dr Wheelock, as he is called here, is sporting a canary yellow shirt and looks like a clone of Bill Clinton during his happier days in the White House. Wheelock is the head of histopathology at the brain bank. He is the one in charge of cutting micrometer-thin slices from particularly important parts of the incoming brains, so they can be studied and a precise characterization and diagnosis made. Wheelock happily joins our excursion.

“People come in large tour groups. Of course, there are media people running around all the time, but there are also teams of nursing students and an endless procession of high school classes and librarians.”

“Librarians?”

“Yes, we’ve had quite a few of them. Don’t ask me why. But the high school students are my favorite. These kids are crazy about looking at all the stuff we’ve got. They think it’s cool and a little creepy at the same time. They just lap it up, when I lay out all my stained samples, and the best thing is going to the storage room.”

The storage room is like a modern vision of eternity. From floor to ceiling, there are brains in slices and smaller fragments collected over the years and stored in transparent tupperware containers.

“A brain donation is an invaluable gift to neuroscience research,” explains the attractive informational brochure. And a glossy, confidence-inspiring light-brown folder deals with the religious aspects of a post mortem donation.

Many people find this decision difficult and complicated. It is a decision that makes many people examine their innermost thoughts about death – whether there is life after death and what makes up the soul.

Fortunately, if you are Protestant, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist, you can find religious support for donating your brain to science. Pope Pius XII was an early standard bearer for tissue donation, and his successors hold the banner high. The Orthodox Rabbi Moses Tendler goes so far as to say that organ donation is actually a duty under certain circumstances.

Each psychiatric and degenerative disease has its own special brochure. There is also one for normal control brains. In the back, you can find a form on which you can register your preliminary interest. “If you are interested in making a brain donation, we recommend the following steps: 1) Discuss it with your family and inform your doctor. 2) Fill out and return the attached questionnaire.”

Despite the fact that postage is even paid in advance, donors are hard to come by. Healthy folk, who would function as a control group, are especially reluctant to be parted from their brains. The sick are more willing, possibly because the bank has good connections with patient associations, which provide information and encouragement. Most control brains come from the spouses of sick donors. Naturally, I imagine that the employees at the brain bank pledged their organs long ago; but both George and Wheelock remain silent, when I ask. The two gentlemen smile wryly, look at each other and then down at the table. They have never really considered it, they say, and Wheelock’s voice is strangely faltering.

“If I got Parkinson’s, it probably wouldn’t feel so strange, but there’s nothing wrong with me. What about you, George?”

“I would leave it up to my family. They’re the ones who’ll have to live with the decision.”

The brain bank does not accept donations from abroad – the transport time is too long. But if they took Danish brains, would I give them mine? I already carry an ordinary donor card in my purse, so my serviceable spare parts can be used if I meet with an accident. But it feels different with the brain. To think that Timothy Wheelock would inspect its most minute details and George Tejada would cut it into small pieces, pickle it in a jar, and keep it in a storage room. Or even worse: That some callous journalist would fondle it and describe the experience in some tawdry publication.

Take my liver, my kidneys, my heart – fine, they’re just organs. But my brain – that’s me! I can almost endorse Sherlock Holmes’ adage: “I am a brain, my dear Watson, and the rest of me is a mere appendage.”

But that’s the way it is – it’s sinking in that we, each of us, are our brains. Not so very many years ago, there was fierce opposition to heart transplants, because the heart was somehow associated with the self. Today, we all know – and feel – that the heart is simply a muscle, a pump that can be replaced, like the carburetor in a car. As the heart decreased in importance, the soul has ever so gradually become equated with the brain.

“Know thyself”, it said above the entrance to the oracle at Delphi, and more than two thousand years later, we’re still on the same quest. “Who am I and what does it mean to be human?” we ask. But we are asking in a new way. Whereas, before, the speculations turned to culture and the psyche, which was strangely disconnected from the organism, the physical brain is now prominent and steadily becoming the reservoir and end station for all the questions we ask about human nature and existence.

What goes on in the brain, when we love or hate ? What areas of the brain are active when people gamble or hunger for alcohol or cocaine? What’s wrong with the brain of a violent criminal? Where do emotions reside, and how are thoughts generated?

Neuroscience is the new philosophy, some say, and there is no doubt that brain research is the hottest topic a scientist can dabble in, and the most distinguished thing you can put on your calling card. A while ago I heard the American philosopher Daniel Dennett explain why this is the case. He was in transit on his way from one interview to the next but agreed to meet me at Boston airport, where he generously provided a meal of oysters and lots of white wine. The interview focused on his latest book, Breaking the Spell, in which Dennett argues that religion is a natural phenomenon. There are no gods, just stubborn, irrational ideas that only exist between our ears. Ideas born from crackling electronic signals between brain cells that are carried on by language and upbringing from one generation to the next. At one point in an extended exposition, Dennett suddenly stopped to utter something that sounded like a prophecy.

“The next generation of geniuses will appear in brain research. Once it was particle physics that attracted the brightest young people, then it was DNA and genome research, but now it’s the neurosciences. Because this is where you can answer the big questions.”

With his white hair and beard, Dennett had taken on the air of a Biblical patriarch; looking serious, he pointed at me with his oyster fork. I tried to respond with something clever, but since he’d been so kind as to refill my wine glass several times, I could only produce a meek affirmative remark. Not long afterwards, I happened to think of our conversation when I stumbled upon an excerpt from author Tom Wolfe’s collection of essays, Hooking Up. The book was published in 2000, in the heyday of information technology, but even then Wolfe could already glimpse the horizon be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Brainy Revolution
• 2. Finding God in the synapses: your own personal Jesus
• 3. Morality comes from within – the brain as ethics council
• 4. Happiness is a cognitive workout
• 5. Our social mind – it’s all about simulation
• 6. Economics – the invisible hand of the mind
• 7. Selling it to your neurons
• 8. Lies, damn lies – the prints are all over your cortex
• 9. Free us from ourselves
• Notes
• Index