Brain: A 21st Century Look at a 400 Million Year Old Organ (Bunker Hill
Publishing; available: October 2010) is the companion volume to the
highly acclaimed Bones, Brains and DNA, and is based on a new exhibit at
the American Museum of Natural History that opens November 3rd, 2010. Is
the brain something that works the way it is supposed to like a computer
or something that works not quite as well as it is supposed to like a
Rube Goldberg contraption? Brains have different purposes depending on
whether you are a mouse (it's useful to smell well) or a human (you need
to walk on two feet) or a whale (you need to know where you are in the
ocean) and for all these purposes and others you need a brain. What kind
of a brain does a fruit fly have? Do plants need brains or can they get
by without one? Does a pea have a brain? What animal had the first
brain? Does brain-size matter and what makes the human brains different
from those of other species? Then there are the chemical questions and
the electrical questions and how messages are sent around your body from
the brain and signals are sent back from the nerve cells to the brain
along multi-lane highways full of neurotransmitters which cope with the
impulses you have sensed from the outside world. Wallace and Darwin show
you how 21st century science works with CATS (No not cats!) and MRIs and
all that Brain Imaging that can explore the brain in action. How we
sleep, how we perceive things, how we dream, how we (and other animals)
remember things, even how we think! Brain takes a 21st Century Look at
the major concepts that will help the reader understand the complex
structure and function of the brain, whether plants have brains and what
the brains of small animals like flies and worms look like and if size
matters. Brain looks at the structure of neural cells and what a
synapse looks like and does as well as examine the chemical nature of
how nerves work and how some molecules like dopamine work to influence
the way our nervous systems work. It also looks at how the brain works
and what parts of the brain might control what functions and how FMRI
(functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) looks at the brain. This
lavishly illustrated book examines how our brain works when we sleep,
see things, perceive and remember things.
