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The human brain is, for want of a better word, ginormous. Sure, it’s only about as big as a cantaloupe, but it’s made of the hungriest cells in the human body. Keeping the brain supplied with energy is a huge challenge. In my new column in Discover, I describe how scientists have discovered some of the molecular tricks we’ve evolved to feed our neurological beast. Check it out.

Amazon has put my ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind on sale for the gotta-get-it price of $3.99. If you want some information on the ebook, check out…

The Brain Cuttings page on my web site

A conversation with science writer Steve Silberman on Brain Cuttings and the future of science ebooks

A review by Vaughan Bell on his essential blog, Mind Hacks

And if the only information you need is “$3.99,” here’s where you can get a copy.

(PS–I have no idea why Amazon decided to put the ebook on sale, and have no idea how long the sale will last. So grab it now!)

Thanks to everyone who scooped up autographed copies of At the Water’s Edge (72 are out the door as of this writing, and 8 are left). My shelves are getting close to being purged of author’s copies–which is good, since those shelves are about to come crashing down for some home renovation.

To keep the momentum going, let me offer to you autographed copies of a book I wrote about the origin of neurology in the wild, woolly days of the scientific revolution: Soul Made Flesh. It’s a group biography of a seventeenth-century band of big thinkers who put the brain–which was considered by many to be little more than a lump of phlegm–at the center of our existence. At the hub of this circle of virtuosi was the English physician Thomas Wills, a man who’s wrongly sunk into oblivion. The story is rich with intrigue, warfare, religious strife, and gorey blood transfusions.  (Here’s a page with more information about the book at my web site.)

Oliver Sacks switched on my orbitofrontal cortex with a happy glow when he had this to say about the book:

“Thomas Willis was the first man to come to grips with the human brain, to see how different parts of it had different functions, and how the human soul could be embodied in it. In Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer gives a remarkable, beautiful account of England’s ‘genius century,’ and of the intertwined lives of Willis and his contemporaries, Harvey, Boyle, and Hooke. Zimmer brings Willis and his intellectual journey to life–his prose, as always, is clear, vivid, and arresting–and reminds us how startling and revolutionary his discoveries were.”

I’ve got both paperback and hardback copies of the American and British editions on offer at my Amazon store. The only difference to speak of is the covers. All told, I’ve got 54 copies here for you. Both US and UK hardbacks are yours for $15, and both US and UK paperbacks are yours for $8. Below are the links to each kind–if you find that I’m sold of out of one edition, try another!

–US hardback ($15)

–UK hardback ($15)

–US paperback ($8)

–UK paperback ($8)

And if you find they’re all gone, bear in mind that the paperback edition is still in print. I can send you an autographed bookplate if you want–just get in touch.

In the late 1800s, prominent astronomers declared that Mars was criss-crossed by canals–evidence, they declared, of an advanced civilization. But in the early 1900s, astronomers gazed through more powerful telescopes and discovered that the canals were mirages.

The astronomer Percival Lowell, who had become the leading champion of the canals, scoffed at the new findings He declared that the criticism came “solely from those who without experience find it hard to believe or from lack of suitable conditions find it impossible to see.”

Although the new evidence led many astronomers to abandon Lowell’s position, he never retracted his claim. It wasn’t until five decades after his death in 1916 that space probes finally went into orbit around Mars and sent back close-up pictures of a canal-free Red Planet.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way science casts aside bad ideas. For most of us, it’s easy to assume that science shakes them off quickly, but the truth is that it can take quite a while for the process to play out. Recently I was invited to contribute a piece to the new “Sunday Review” section of the New York Times, which just debuted this week. I wrote an essay on this phenomenon, which has been dubbed  ”de-discovery.” I drew on three recent examples of high-profile research that many other scientists have declared to be wrong–arsenic life, clairvoyance, and a link from chronic fatigue syndrome to a virus called XMRV.

To keep my essay from exploding into a novella, I had to limit myself to just these three examples–but I could have picked many others. You just need to check out a blog like Retraction Watch to see how important this part of the scientific process is today. The first draft of my essay actually started out with a fourth example, which I decided to cut it in the end. It’s a peculiar case of a de-discovery of a de-discovery.

In 1981, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould published an influential book about racism and science, called The Mismeasure of Man. Gould argued that social influences could lead scientists to misinterpret their data to suit their beliefs about European superiority. One of his key examples was the work of a nineteenth century anthropologist named Samuel George Morton.

Morton collected 1,000 human skulls from around the world and measured the size of their brain cavities with seeds or lead shot. Gould re-analyzed Morton’s data and published his results in 1978 in the journal Science. He declared that Morton fudged his measurements to ensure that Caucasians would end up with the biggest brains.

In 2000, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania named Jason Lewis started to measure Morton’s skulls for a research project of his own. He was interested in the ways different human populations adapt to different climates—including changes in the shapes of their skulls. It was then that Lewis learned from his advisors about the controversies swirling around the skulls. (He was born a year after The Mismeasure of Man was published.)

As Lewis carried out his own measurements, he gradually realized that Gould had been wrong. He then set out to systematically investigate the matter—taking three years to measure Morton’s skulls, and then another five years to work through Gould’s claims.

Lewis, who just finished earning his Ph.D at Stanford University, wrote up the results with his colleagues and submitted a paper in 2008 to the journal Current Anthropology, which had published a less detailed critique of Gould’s paper in the 1980s. The journal rejected Lewis’s paper, eventually informing him that it was not important enough.

The researchers had better luck with PLOS Biology, which published their paper earlier this month. Lewis and his colleagues presented evidence that Morton did not bias his findings at all. Instead, the researchers conclude, it was Gould who used shoddy statistics. There are many sound scientific reasons to reject racist views of human biology, they argue, but an unfair trashing of Morton’s research isn’t one of them.

“Our analysis of Gould’s claims reveals that most of Gould’s criticisms are poorly supported or falsified,” they write.

When I was researching my essay, I asked Lewis about what he thought of science’s self-correcting process now that he’s finally done with his exploration of Gould and Morton. He has decidedly mixed feelings.

“We can come back thirty years later and get the story straight,” he told me. “But it takes thirty years.”

As I write in my essay in the Times, there are certainly ways to make dediscovery a smoother, faster process. But in an age of instant viral communication, I think we’re going to remain frustrated by inescapable lags.

[Image: Wikipedia. Thanks to folks on Twitter for pointing me to Martian canals as a textbook case of slow dediscovery]

Pain is a paradox. It feels like the most real, objective experience we can have, and yet it can be weirdly malleable. It’s better to think of pain, like memory or vision, not as a simple reflection of the world, but as a strategy we’ve evolved to stay alive. Thinking this way can help make sense of the awful experience of chronic pain, when this urgent signal refers to nothing except a brain caught in its own feedback loops. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at the latest understanding of pain, and some promising research that uses these insights to search for a new, more rational pain-killer. Check it out.

[Image: Boy With A Rooster by Adriano Cecioni, 1868. Photo from Kate Eliot/Flickr via Creative Commons License]

The World Science Festival is going to kick off on Wednesday in New York (I’ll be speaking Thursday on a panel, on telling the stories of science in print and online.) The festival organizers have been publishing a blog on some of the topics that will be explored next week. Riffing on the session on sleep, I’ve just contributed a piece on some wonderful recent research on what it means for us to be asleep and to be awake–and the surprising porous wall that divides the two states of mind. Check it out.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Our neurons exist in a staggering vast network, with 100 billion cells forming some 100 trillion connections. And it’s up to these ordinary cells to form that network on their own, snaking across the brain or even across the body, in order to find the right target. In my latest column for Discover, I look at new research that reveals some of the elegantly simple tricks our nervous system uses to wire itself. Check it out.

Tonight at 6 pm EST I’ll be talking about my ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through The Mind. (Amazon / BN/ Mobipocket ). You can listen live to Your Health Connection on KSKA Public Radio, and even ask questions via phone or email.

My latest Brain column is now online. I look at the science of time travel. We may not be able to transport ourselves physically into the future or the past as H.G. Wells imagined, but we can travel mentally. And it turns out that we use a lot of the same equipment to go in both directions. In fact, our ability to remember our past may have evolved because it helped us project ourselves into the future. Check it out.

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Greetings, Loominaries of Philadelphia! I will be heading your way to give a talk tomorrow (Thursday) at the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

My talk will be entitled, “Soul Made Flesh: The Origin of Our Brain-Centered World.” I’ll argue, as I did in the eponymous book, that as we grapple with the implications of twenty-first-century neuroscience, we’d do well to cast our minds back 350 years ago, when scientific revolutionaries first discovered that the brain was not a bowl of curds.

The details:

When: Thursday, April 07 2011, 4:00pm – 5:30pm
Location : Silverman Hall, Room 245A, University of Pennsylvania (3400 Chestnut St.)
Contact : info@neuroethics.upenn.edu

[Image: The frontispiece of "The Anatomy of the Brain," reproduced in Soul Made Flesh]

When you’re a teenager, it seems like nobody understands you. And once you’re finished being a teenager and get to observe them as an adult, you have to wonder what on Earth is going through their heads. In my new column for Discover, I gingerly step into the teenage mind, exploring what neuroscientists are learning about how their brains work. Teenagers may do things that seem crazy and/or stupid, but that doesn’t mean they themselves are crazy or stupid. The teen years turn out to be a unique phase of mental life, when we tally up the rewards and costs of our choices with a kind of math that you won’t find in the heads of children or grownups. Check it out.