Explorers of the Black Box
The Search for the Cellular Basis of Memory
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Explorers of the Black Box is a scientific adventure story. The “Black Box” is the brain. The “Explorers” are neuroscientists in search of how nerve cells record memories, and they are as ruthless and dauntless as any soldiers of fortune. The book centers around the early, often-controversial research Nobel Prize–winner Eric Kandel. It takes readers behind the scenes of laboratories at Woods Hole, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton to create an absorbing account of how the brain works and of how science itself works.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When today's neuroscientists turn from their lab work to discuss distinctions between such terms as "brain'' and ``mind,'' they betray how mysterious, subtle and indeterminate is their study of the human brain. Allport, herself one of the ``explorers of the black box'' (she has worked at the Massachusetts Woods Hole Marine Biological Lab), makes clear the reasons why there is such excitement in this new field. Psychiatry has gone just so far, while the Pavlovian behaviorism of the past century, itself at an impasse, has given way to an experimental science using astonishing techniques. Allport's history of the study of the brain, from the time of the first Golgi stain (of a slice of tissue) through Adrian's discovery of brain ``spikes'' in 1925 to Eric Kandel's experiments on the sea-snail Alypsia (beginning at Woods Hole in the 1960s), makes wondrous if challenging reading. Students and serious readers will study Allport profitably.
