BOOKS

A Mismeasure of Mind

Postcards From the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds

Brian Burrell; Broadway Books, $24.95

Lord Byron, the poet who first nudged Mary Shelley to pen the novel Frankenstein, inadvertently inspired another myth: that the root of greatness lay in an oversize brain. To promulgate this notion, Byron did nothing more than drop dead. Following Byron’s demise in 1824 in Greece, a curious physician removed the poet’s gray matter and discovered it weighed “six medicinal pounds,” roughly 25 percent heavier than the average brain. News soon spread through the medical community, spawning a cultlike investigation into the connection between anatomy and intelligence.

Postcards From the Brain Museum is a tragically funny history of this flawed paradigm. It tells the story of the golden age of brain collecting, from the late 19th century to the mid-20th, when famous people bequeathed their brains to science, expecting posthumous confirmation of their brilliance. Such study of “elite brains” consisted largely of inspecting physical attributes such as size, surface fissures, or cellular content, each of which was considered at one time or another to be the crucial indicator of intelligence. Great men had teeny brains, too, but zealous researchers could always explain away that inconvenient fact by claiming that the number of these was insignificant.

Brian Burrell, a mathematician at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, travels the world to inspect these shriveled relics, which languish in the obscure back rooms of museums and universities. The charm of his book lies in its revelations about famous figures touched by this futile endeavor. Walt Whitman became an adherent of the kooky phrenology movement in the United States, only to have his brain destroyed, probably when it was dropped by a clumsy handler. Einstein’s was harvested along with his eyes, now rumored to be in a New York City bank vault. Lenin’s was sliced wafer thin, mounted on slides, and scrutinized to support the legitimacy of Communism. France’s Mutual Autopsy Society, whose members pledged to leave each other their brains, behaved like the Ouroboros, a mythical self-consuming snake: Young members harvested the old, only to be harvested themselves decades later. And Cesare Lombroso, the father of criminal anthropology, concocted the wrongheaded idea of a criminal mind, which coincidentally influenced the plot of every Frankenstein film ever made.

Nowadays, of course, brain science follows more fruitful avenues, such as the chemistry of neurotransmitters and the analysis of brain function using CT scans and magnetic resonance imaging. Pickled brains—elite, criminal, or not—have been consigned to dusty closets, because, as Burrell says, researchers have finally accepted a prosaic truth: All brains look alike.       

—Joseph D’Agnese

GIZMOS 

www.opticalitycorp.com

A gigantic vision of a frosty bottle of beer, slowly rotating, hovers two feet in front of Opticality’s 50-inch flat-screen TV. The illusion, for which no stereoscopic glasses are needed, is the creation of a clan of enterprising optical engineers who lost their jobs when the East German branch of Carl Zeiss was privatized. Using parts scrounged from defunct factories, they developed a system that combines software and hardware to create the sensation of three dimensions. The software scans a computer-generated 3-D representation of objects from eight different angles; an interlaced composite is then presented on a screen, which is overlaid with a printed optical filter. The filter breaks up the screen into eight viewing zones, only two of which—one zone per eye—can be seen from any position in front of the TV. Each eye sees the scene from a slightly different angle, and the viewer’s brain interprets this as a three-dimensional image.

Opticality expects advertisers, as well as medical and gaming companies, to be early adopters of this technology, which can be adapted to most flat-plasma or LCD screens. For example, surgeons could evaluate medical conditions using lifelike visualizations, while games could become more fully immersive. Even the art world is in on the act: In March, the Aichi Museum in Japan unveiled a 12-foot-high, 15-foot-long LCD video wall that features Opticality’s technology and forms the world’s largest 3-D display. —Dan Dubno

EXHIBITS

The Corpse Police

CSI: Crime Scene Insects 

Pink Palace Museum

3050 Central Avenue

Memphis, Tennessee

www.memphismuseums.org

Through May 8, 2005

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

11 West Jones Street

Raleigh, North Carolina

www.naturalsciences.org

June 25 through September 18, 2005

Maggots the size of mice greet guests visiting CSI: Crime Scene Insects, seeming to leap out from a stroboscopic light sculpture that animates all four stages of the fly life cycle: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. “The Fly Wheel,” which forms the centerpiece of this exhibit, reveals one of the ways in which forensic entomologists determine how much time has passed since a crime victim’s death. Since different insect species arrive at a corpse in a predictable order, such experts can read a decaying body like a calendar simply by analyzing the type and number of creepy crawlies present.

Rookie detectives can participate in this process with the aid of whiteboards scrawled with synopses of crime cases. One scenario describes a human skull infested with dermestid beetles—which can feed on bones and hair—found in 1991 inside an extinct Hawaiian volcano. The beetles were metamorphosing from larvae to adults, which occurs when they are about 53 days old. The finding showed how long the skull had been lying there and helped convict a prime suspect of murder.

Entomologist M. Lee Goff of Chaminade University in Honolulu, who helped assemble these displays, clearly prizes good science over gross-out spectacle. Happily, the two often go together. Visitors who peer into glass terrariums will see  dermestid beetles munching away at a meal of mouse or pig snout. They can also view courtroom footage from cases solved with the aid of insects. No loopy CSI plots here, just bona fide facts—and a dose of six-legged charm.         

—Elizabeth Svoboda

WE ALSO LIKE . . . 

The Bomb: A Life Gerard DeGroot

Harvard University Press, $27.95

Pausing to consider the glory days of atomic enthusiasm (check out the mushroom-cloud-adorned Miss Atomic Bomb of 1957), DeGroot traces the vexed history of nuclear weapons from the Manhattan Project to present-day proliferation. Disarmament campaigns get their due, but the author also argues that talk of arms reduction became futile once nations had accepted “the mad giant of deterrence.”  

—Chris Jozefowicz

Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession

Don Kulick and Anne Meneley, editors; Penguin, $16.95

Moving beyond diet fads and exercise schemes, each writer in this anthology shows how one’s perception of fat—whether it’s bulging, beautiful, deadly, sexual, or repulsive—is shaped by the culture of the beholder. The 14 essays flesh out such topics as the stout feminine body ideal in western Niger and the fat-stealing vampires that have become symbols of oppression in Peru.  

—Zach Zorich