Dana Foundation Blog

Rudolph Tanzi Authors New Book and Stars in PBS Special

Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives member and Harvard professor and neuroscientist Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D., also unofficially referred to as a “rock star of science,” is a skilled jazz organist, impassioned advocate for neuroscience research and public outreach, and a distinguished neuroscientist who co-discovered the gene for Alzheimer’s disease.

Tanzi, who worked with Aerosmith’s Joe Perry on a music track and a public service campaign highlighting the need for more funding for medical research, recently collaborated with Deepak Chopra, M.D., on a series of articles for the San Francisco Chronicle pondering the concept of a “conscious universe” as opposed to one that functions upon chance and randomness. Andrew Doerfler wrote in a Boston Globe article about Tanzi’s projects: “As strange as it seems for a renowned genetic researcher to end up playing on a new album with one of rock’s all time bands, Tanzi expects colleagues to react to his collaborations with Chopra with just as much surprise.” Indeed, Tanzi is eager to consider unconventional and holistic views of science.

Arts of Neuroscientists: Nicolas Bazan

A six-year-old boy witnesses a loved one's a seizure, and years later goes on to discover unique neurochemical changes in the brain at the onset of experimental seizures and stroke. After turning his
back on music—he had been walking to piano lessons with his aunt the day of her seizure—he rediscovers his passion for it in New Orleans and writes a novel that connects music and neuroscience.

Summer Reading List: Brain Books

Last year I wrote a summer reading list blog, highlighting brain books recently published by members of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. Since then, our members have published a number of new books on topics ranging from addiction to free will to neurogastronomy. When you get around to finishing the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy (it’s everywhere!), here are some great books to keep in mind (descriptions are taken directly from the publishers’ websites).

The Addicted Brain: Why We Abuse Drugs, Alcohol, and Nicotine, by Michael Kuhar, FT Science Press.
“Addiction destroys lives. In The Addicted Brain, a leading neuroscientist explains how and why this happens–and presents advances in treatment and prevention. Using breathtaking brain imagery and other research, Michael Kuhar, Ph.D., shows the powerful, long-term brain changes that drugs can cause, revealing why it can be so difficult for addicts to escape their grip.”

World Science Festival: Why We Tell Stories

Watch the video below. What do you see?

If you are like most people (117 out of 120 in the original study), these shapes tell a story. Humans are primed to see a narrative, even when the characters involved are shapes. We experience pleasure “even watching this really rudimentary fiction,” said Dr. Jonathan Gottschall at a World Science Festival event. Dr. Gottschall’s work explores the connections between science and the humanities.

Dr. Gottschall was joined at the event, “Why We Tell Stories: The Science of Narrative,” by novelists Jeffrey Eugenides and Joyce Carol Oates, psychologists Keith Oatley and Paul Bloom, and moderator Jay Allison.

I’ll Keep My Skull Intact, Thanks

Lots of brain-related books land on my desk. But A Hole in the Head: More Tales in the History of Neuroscience by Charles G. Gross, recently released in paperback by MIT Press, may be the first one with such an evocative cover:

That’s a hole in the head, alright.

So I had to read the chapter that gives the book its name. A warning to delicate readers: reading about trepanation (also called trephination) is not for the faint of heart. Here’s why:

Top: Trepanation tools used by a 17^th century naval surgeon. Bottom: Marks left from (1) scraping (2) grooving (3) boring and cutting and (4) rectangular cuts.

Be glad I left out a drawing from 1761 of a doctor using one of these tools. Yikes.

When archaelogist Ephraim George Squier received the very skull pictured on the book’s cover as a gift from a Peruvian antiquities dealer in 1865 and brought it to the attention of the medical community, no one could believe it (the skull is now at the American Museum of Natural History). The survival rate of trepanation procedures in the mid-1800s was a mere 10 percent. How could an ancient Incan receive such a procedure and, based on analysis of the skull, live to tell the tale?

Since Squier’s skull discovery, archaelogists have found thousands more skulls with trepanation marks from across time and continent—Neolithic, ancient Chinese, Roman, Kenyan. Researchers estimate that the survival rate of ancient trepanations may have been as high as 90 percent.

Why was trepanation so common? We’ll never know for certain why prehistoric cultures performed the surgery. In the Fifth Century BCE, writes Gross, Hippocrates recommended it for all head wounds except those involving “depressed fractures” to “allow the blood to escape.” In Gross’ words, Galen (129-199) recommended trepanation “for relieving pressure, for gaining access to remove skull fragments that threatened the dura, and...for drainage.” It was also used to treat mental illness and epilepsy.

It wasn’t until trepanation moved to a hospital setting in the mid-1800s that the mortality rate skyrocketed. But now that we know about sanitation and sterilization, neurosurgeons today use trepanation successfully, writes Gross, “for exploratory diagnosis, for relieving intracranial pressure...for debridement of a penetrating wound, and to gain access to the dura and thence the brain itself.”

To this day, some still advocate for the use of trepanation as treatment, thinking that it will increase blood flow to the brain and improve brain function. As Gross says, “Just because a procedure is very old does not mean it is necessarily an effective one, at least for enhanced enlightenment and creativity.”

Those sound like wise words to me.

--Johanna Goldberg