James W. Kalat
Why does contracting one muscle interfere with contracting a different one? How did a scientist uncover the chemical basis of memory using a sea slug? And why did a Nobel Prize once go to the inventor of the lobotomy?In Major Figures in the History of Neuroscience, veteran psychology professor James W. Kalat tells the surprising, often funny, sometimes tragic human stories behind the discoveries that built modern brain science. From Santiago Ramon y Cajal sketching neurons by hand to the 3 a.m. dream that sent Otto Loewi running to his lab with two frogs and an idea that would win him a Nobel Prize, each of these forty-plus profiles shows just how messy, accidental, and deeply personal scientific progress really is.You’ll meet someone whose interest in parapsychology led to the EEG, a graduate student who defied her advisor and discovered the brain’s own morphine receptors, and a researcher whose career-defining find depended on one old, nearly blind horseshoe crab.Written with warmth, humor, and a storyteller’s eye for the telling detail, this collection turns the history of neuroscience into something rare: a science book you’ll want to read for the people, not just the facts.Meet the minds behind the brain.
