378: The Untold Story of the Neuron with Benjamin Ehrlich
“One of the qualities that I think is essential to his character is like, he was irrepressible. He had this desire to create and to excel that couldn’t be tamed. His father thought of education as a taming process, but Cajal couldn’t be.”
This week we’re joined by Benjamin Ehrlich, author of The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron.
It’s a book about the discoveries and life of Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who has been called the ‘father of modern neuroscience.’
While today relatively unknown outside of his field, Cajal’s discoveries about the brain changed the field of neuroscience forever. In 1906 he won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on neurons, which he called “the mysterious butterflies of the soul … whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.”
