The Brain in Search of Itself

The Nobel Prize–winning scientist who transformed our understanding of the human mind—now the first major biography of this singular figure.

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 Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, he ranks among the most brilliant and original biologists of the nineteenth century. His lifelong investigation of neurons—"the mysterious butterflies of the soul," Cajal called them—earned him the Nobel Prize in 1906 and produced a dazzling oeuvre of anatomical drawings that grace the pages of medical textbooks to this day.

Benjamin Ehrlich's The Brain in Search of Itself is the first major English biography of this singular figure, whose scientific odyssey mirrored the rocky journey of his beloved homeland of Spain into the twentieth century. Born into relative poverty, Cajal became an illustrious figure who transformed the underdeveloped science of his time. He argued that the nervous system is comprised of individual cells with distinctive roles, just like any other organ in the body, prevailing in one of the greatest scientific rivalries in history.

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 the story of how the brain as we know it came into being and a finely wrought portrait of a fantastical and complex man who devoted his life to science.