You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

There's more than what we see.

There's so many cool, newfangled tools in neuroscience these days that it's often hard to imagine how something as simple as a microscope

and a graphite pencil might have led someone to win the Nobel Prize. Of course, it's not that simple,

but it's easy to get lost with all of this new technology. And now there's been a lot of controversy,

as I'm sure a lot of you already

know, about different kinds of tools and how they're used. For example, there's work coming out

showing that functional neuroimaging like fMRI really isn't as stable or reproducible as we might

want it to be or think it is.

So that's why I thought it might be fun to take a deeper dive into the life of someone who used just his drawing tools and a microscope to overturn the doctrine of the time

of how the brain is built.

Look up the hippocampus, my favorite brain region, on Wikipedia,

and you'll find that the images that accompany it are still drawn over 100 years ago

by Santiago Ramon E. Cahal.

For someone who won the Nobel Prize, and basically is considered the father of modern neuroscience, who overturned the idea that the brain is just a tangle of wires and instead focused on the fact that it's made up of individual discrete cells we call neurons, it's amazing to think that there hasn't yet been a complete biography.

And that's where Benjamin Erlich comes in.

He's recently published a book called The Brain in Search of Itself,

Santiago Romo Monica Hall and the story of the neuron,

...