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Fall 2005

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A Very Grey Matter
In his new book, Brian Burrell ’85G uncovers the murky history of brain studies

—Karen Skolfield ’98G




	UMass Amherst math professor Brian Burrell ’85G.

AS YOU READ THIS, THE neurons in that big, beautiful brain of yours are firing the body’s equivalent of the 21-gun salute. Though we mostly take our noggins for granted, the brain has inspired some of the most inflammatory and dead-wrong theories in all of anatomical science (“hair-brained” leaps to mind). Does the size of your brain and its winding fissures mean you have the brain of a genius, a criminal, or a bit of both? Sadly, the relentless pursuit of this question by scores of scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries brought us not one iota closer to the answer.

The pursuit, however, turns out to be quite a story. Sitting in the graduate student lounge, surrounded by brains pondering the last days of spring finals, Brian Burrell ’85G explains how he became interested in these brain studies. Burrell is a lecturer in the Math Department at UMass Amherst, - www.math.umass.edu - and author of the smartly named Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds, a lively and studiously researched book on the study of the brain over the last two centuries.

How does a mathematician become interested in the brain? It’s the first question I ask Burrell, and he looks a bit disappointed (“Don’t you want to know how I became interested in writing?” he asks), but he answers both questions. The genesis of his writing—Postcards is his fourth book—came from a desire to complete a book idea handed down to him by his father. The genesis of Postcards came about as a series of smaller events including Burrell’s chancing upon a recent paper on Einstein’s brain and a well-timed query from an editor asking if he had a project in the works.

“I started by trying to track down mathematicians’ brains,” Burrell says. “The surprising thing is that many of the brains still existed. [Carl Friedrich] Gauss’s brain (think Gaussian curve—the bell curve) was sitting on some professor’s desk. No one seemed to know about the continued existence of [the brains]. There are some strange things in this world, still out there.”

Of course, these mathematicians—and artists and astronomers, physicians and poets and more—hadn’t planned on becoming some of the oddest paperweights around. They gave their brains to an emerging science that looked for the secret of what makes us distinct. “Gave,” however, might need to be in quotes; Burrell provides numerous stories of brains plundered without the family’s consent and brains taken from the cadavers of criminals and the mentally retarded or insane. The study of brains became the wellspring of some of the weirdest pseudo-science around, from phrenology (the study of the bumps on your head) to eugenics and the idea of a superior race.

Reviews by the press have been quite favorable: The New York Times calls Burrell’s book an “entertaining, tragicomic tale of scientific failure”; the San Diego Union-Tribune calls it a “richly insightful and accessible history of the study of the human brain.” The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Discover Magazine, NPR’s Morning Edition, and even Entertainment Weekly gave his book the thumbs up. About this, Burrell says with a laugh, “all the attention goes to the idea of the book. I don’t think I can retire on this.”

It’s an odd concept: The brains of Walt Whitman, Albert Einstein, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and so many others given to a science that has reached no conclusions, that has gained no ground, sitting in their wet jars if they’ve been well preserved, reduced to a few dark lumps if maintenance has been sketchy, or missing entirely. At the outset of brain studies, of course, no one could know the dead ends that lay ahead, multiple and twisting as the fissures of the human brain. “The only reasonable assumption,” Burrell writes, “is that at the outset of any life, any healthy brain has a potential that is essentially infinite… despite occasional claims to the contrary, no one has managed to dislodge it.”

Which is not to say that the locus for our genius or criminal selves won’t ever be found, though it seems more and more unlikely. Until then, it’s a comforting thought that whatever we may be, our brains won’t be used to reveal the secret.

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