HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Benjamin Ehrlich.

He's the author of the book, The Brain in Search of Itself, an essayist, whose work has appeared in the best American short stories of 2023.

His other work has been featured in the Paris Review, Lit Hub, Scientific American, The Gettysburg Review, and the New England Review among other important outfits.

Ben, a pleasure to see you today.

EHRLICH: Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

HEFFNER: Let me ask you to begin with, how did you discover the principal subject of the brain in search of itself?

Was it some source material you were reading, or what was the genesis of this project from its inception?

EHRLICH: Well, a friend of mine sent me an email with an image, a drawing of a brain cell that Cajal the subject of my book had produced in the late 19th century.

And I had almost like a religious experience when I saw this drawing.

It was like, the Sistine Chapel for me and all these sensations in my body, and I start thinking, is this the seed of the mind?

What am I looking at?

Is this consciousness itself?

And, I just went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

And that was 12 years ago.

That's how long it took me to finally produce the book after that initial seed.

HEFFNER: And this neuroscientist, this person that you're profiling, had you heard his name before in any scientific context?

And as you began to undertake the project, what was the facet of his career or exploration of science that most interested you?

EHRLICH: I was shocked that I had never heard of him before.

But on the other hand, I never took a college level science course.

Every intro to neuroscience course includes a biographical sketch about him.

I had just never encountered that before.

I was a literature major.

And so for me, after seeing that drawing that really touched me so deeply.

It was Cajal's love of literature that really attracted me to his biography.

He wrote an autobiography and he describes books like Don Quixote really influencing his development.

And I have experienced that myself with literature.

And so initially it wasn't anything scientific about his career at all.

It was more about his, personal psychological development HEFFNER: And what was the link between that original drawing and that psychological development.

He also is credited with recognizing, a precocious insight in science in his lifetime.

But if you were to take us through kind of the drawing itself and what intrigued you about the drawing to, you said, personal development, what was the kind of trajectory, the line there between this drawing and what, and then what you found so intriguing about his own growth?

EHRLICH: Well, I contend in the book, and I contend, personally, that image making is similar in art and science, that we expect science to be objective.

But, in fact, scientific images are created by human beings with a wealth of experience in particular biases.

And they're limited by their tools at their disposal.

So everything that Cajal experienced from the small town where he was born in the mountains of northern Spain to the books that he read, I think all contributed to his vision of the neuron, which is what he's credited with discovering.

And that's what I saw an image of was the neuron.

So my contention is that you can't separate the art from the artist, even though it's science.

HEFFNER: You say, and for our audience Cajal is credited with discovering the most formative and essential knowledge about the neuron and the nervous system.

And as you were unearthing his life, what was it about his particular scientific process being informed literature, as a student of literature, that appealed to you, in other words, how he made his discovery, as it really related to a new understanding about the nervous system?

EHRLICH: So the neuron is another type of cell.

It's a specialized type of cell, but at the time, there was a disagreement about what constituted the material in the brain.

Most people believed it was a fixed, what they called a reticulum, like a tangle of fibers.

Cajal insisted that neurons were individuals, and his favorite characters in the romantic novels that he grew up with were individual heroes.

He was a staunch individualist in his upbringing.

And my contention is not of course, that that's enough to make a scientific discovery, but it's interesting to look at how someone's individual personal psychological development might help them identify a scientific discovery when the time is read.

Of course, technically he was expert.

He had a genius capacity for visualization.

And all of that is most relevant.

But combined with his personal interests in psychology, I think, is what explains the discovery, in my opinion.

HEFFNER: For those who were searching for a contemporary context to understand why what he accomplished was foundational and how it's related to ongoing scientific understanding and pursuit of new learning and innovation, would you say that you agree that his work should be studied because it is relevant to the daily practice of neuroscience today?

EHRLICH: Absolutely.

His book on the histology of the nervous system is really like On the Origin of the Species for neuroscience.

Anybody who's performing neuroscientific studies on neurons owes their work to Cajal.

Cajal also did functional research.

He was limited by his technology at the time, but he had functional theories related to how he studied the anatomy of neurons through a technique called histology, where he would section tissue and stain it with chemicals and then examine it under the microscope.

But he made assumptions about how neurons function based on that.

And it turns out that over a hundred years later, his discoveries and his theories about the functions of neurons are proven correct.

HEFFNER: And just for context, what is kind of the current study of neurons right now?

How is it taking shape, and what is it most focused on?

EHRLICH: Neuroscience, I'm no expert on contemporary neuroscience, but it's a kind of amalgam of many subfields.

So you have people doing anything from cognitive behavioral neuroscience to molecular neuroscience.

So, for a lot of people, Cajal exists as kind of a spiritual guide.

I've met, I mentioned this in the book, a number, more than a couple of people who have tattoos of Cajal's drawings on their bodies.

So he really is kind of a legendary figure in the field.

HEFFNER: Much of your book also is an artistic portrait and compelling narrative of Spanish history.

Um, and Spain is in the news again.

We're recording this and will not air imminently, but for the past many years, there's been a separatist movement that formed in the Catalonian region to represent their interests.

There is controversy around the political class and specifically ensnaring the current prime minister about his desire to forgive the separatists in order to coalesce a majority presumably to legislate more effectively.

For our viewers, that's a piece of contemporary history, but I wonder how you see it because you chronicled a period of the life of Spain in the life of Cajal, at interesting point when there were wars at the beginning of his career as a doctor through the discoveries that he made in science.

So how see Spain from certainly a very informed and unique perspective?

EHRLICH: Well, again, I don't know much about contemporary Spain, however, when Cajal lived in the 19th century, it was a particularly chaotic time.

I think there were like 34 governments in the, in the 1800s.

And, Cajal fought in a war overseas in Cuba, nearly died of malaria and dysentery.

He was a patriot, but not a jingoist.

I think it's an important distinction.

He lived through what was called the disaster of 98, 1898, where Spain lost its final colonies, and there was this kind of reckoning within Spanish society about how to marshal resources and some of the intellectual poverty that had maybe taken hold and who was ruling and how.

And Cajal was very involved in that.

He became sort of a public intellectual, but he was always very staunch about the unity of Spain.

I contend that he kind of saw Spain as like a neuron.

He wanted Spain as an individual entity to be in contact with other individual entities as nations, and to work together in much the same way that neurons express and share currents with each other for there to be a kind of nervous system of countries throughout the world.

HEFFNER: Is there a sense you have that science was not taken for granted at the time of his life in the way that it may be today as a function of some modern innovations?

Is there a feeling in understanding the reaction to his discoveries that there was more scientific alertness or literacy or curiosity, or is that something you were able to discern in your research?

EHRLICH: That may be true in other countries, but Spain was a scientific backwater at the time.

There, there was pretty much no understanding of Cajal's discoveries, and he was so discriminated against by the central European countries that when he made his major discovery and brought it to an anatomical congress in Berlin, he couldn't even get passersby to stop and look at his microscope for a while because they just heard his funny accent and saw how different he looked.

So even when he died a national hero, but almost nobody understood why he was just a venerated personage for his wisdom and what he represented in terms of Spanish triumph.

HEFFNER: When you say hero, it wasn't specifically the science that was being celebrated at the time of his death.

It his patriotic, paternal figure in kind of the connectedness to the country.

Is that what you're saying?

EHRLICH: He represented, like I said, a triumph, a national triumph.

His Nobel Prize was a huge deal.

I mean, he was the second Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize, but the first one was in literature.

So the idea that a Spaniard could win a Nobel Prize in science or physiology in medicine, as it's called, was completely foreign to anybody who was living at the time.

And it was like a beyond a curiosity.

It filled the newspapers.

People came to his house and cheered him on from his balcony, you know, on his balcony.

It was like he was a sensation.

HEFFNER: What was to you the most surprising or interesting part of writing the book and researching, the man and the scientist and the, the collective impact?

You mentioned his own personal growth, separate from the intellectual findings of scientific discovery.

But what in the search of this biography, what struck you the most potently that we may not have covered yet?

EHRLICH: I think it was the discovery of his dream, his dream diaries, which was the subject of my first book.

He hated Freud.

He was jealous of Freud's popularity within Spain, and he thought Freud was pseudoscientific.

So he set out to disprove Freud by keeping a dream diary in which he pretty much just vindicates Freud to the extent that I think he decided not to publish because he realized that he might have some egg on his face.

But the dreams are extremely moving to me, to me, as someone who studied his life, and he was quite repressed individual.

He suffered abuse at the hands of his father and teachers as a child, but never talks about it really explicitly.

He also lost young children to disease.

And those show up in his dreams, but he refuses to articulate or express or theorize about them.

And there's something tragic about saying I drowned holding my daughter.

And then in terms of conclusions, he writes, none at all, you know, as though as though that's not an obvious reference to the death of his young daughter.

So that was really kind of a treasure trove of information about his character.

HEFFNER: That's fascinating.

And what do you surmise, was it just contentiousness with Freud or the jealousy of Freud, or was it at all the idea that he wanted to separate dream from science?

There's now a growing field, a very young field, but there are some scholars who want to study dreams to establish kind of what they can inform about the human brain and also how they can interplay with new technologies.

But I could imagine a kind of resistance to the idea that this is the subconscious and like not cognitively functioning world that we should study.

It's not fair game, if you know what I mean.

EHRLICH: Yeah, that's a really good point.

I think Cajal and Freud at that time, I think Cajal was representing what you might call the neurobiological view of dreams, where you can study auditory and visual phenomena.

If there's like something going on in terms of you're seeing things during a dream, maybe you can study what's happening in your neurons while that's happening.

And Freud, of course, is more theoretical and more abstract.

So I think Cajal was trying to, he wasn't saying dreams weren't worth studying.

I think he was saying they needed to be studied scientifically.

And I think he dismissed Freud as a pseudoscientist.

HEFFNER: It brings to mind an episode we did with Noah Hutton on his work, and a question that I posed to him about who, if anyone, is not just trying to understand what's going on with neurons in our sleep and in our dreams, but actually the concept of memory and dreams and how we can remember dreams.

Even if he didn't write about, reflect on his dreams from the scientific perspective, did he at all establish whether he thought recording our dreams, there establish whether he thought recording our dreams, there could be technology in the future that could record our dreams in a way that would tell us something about to teach us in our conscience, in our consciousness, not just our subconscious.

I'm just wondering, it, it seems like a kind of advanced AI era insight that he might not have been capable of possessing, but he was a very precocious person in scientist.

I just wonder if he had he had any commentary on that question of the degree to which we our dreams can inform our lives and help better inform our lives.

EHRLICH: He didn't.

I think he would've taken the opposite view.

I think he dismissed dreams as kind of random activity.

I think what he believed is that we have our waking everyday normal, let's say neurons and their activity.

And then when they shut down while we're sleeping, there's this random other activity that means nothing.

I think he would say it's sound and fury.

HEFFNER: I'm still wondering if in our lifetimes there will be any kind of technology that does it for us, in effect.

Because it's, I think, laborious and also very inconsistent to be able to monitor the content of your dreams.

And Noah and I talked about whether there may be a day when we can record our dreams in the way that we TiVo'ed things or record something on YouTube TV.

To me, that's an endlessly fascinating question.

EHRLICH: It's interesting you bring up Noah because we've been friends since we were 12 years old, as it happens.

HEFFNER: I figured there was some connection in your interests.

How do you see the future of your work, as someone who is a practiced biographer of a scientist, and making the themes and content of the work accessible and relevant for questions that people are considering?

Like the one I just presented to you about dreams that you forewent, but I welcome your thoughts on that subject too.

EHRLICH: Well, I think my work was aided by a grant from the Sloan Foundation for the public communication of science and technology.

And I took that role very seriously.

I had scientific advisors that had to okay my work to make sure that it was accurate.

So I think that a scientific biographer has a double burden.

There's a burden of accuracy to the life of the subject, and then a burden of accuracy to the life of the science.

And, I don't know that I'll do a biography of another scientist.

This just happened to captivate me.

So I'm not exactly sure what my next subject is going to be.

But as a non-scientist, I think there's an advantage as well of not being a kind of insider and being able to explain things for the general reader.

I sort of put myself in the reader's shoes and if I can understand something, I just explain it the way that I understand it, because I have no prior knowledge or expertise.

So, I think there is a benefit to being a science biographer who doesn't really know science well.

HEFFNER: The idea of a brain in search of itself, it's a mesmerizing, captivating one.

We're firing the cylinders of our brain to do basically anything at any time.

And how we're thinking about studying in effect.

Firing the brain to assess what the brain is actually doing.

That's the way you framed it from one perspective.

What did you take away from both the introspective and philosophical idea of that, that a the brain is searching itself?

EHRLICH: I think that that's what defines neuroscience, and that's what makes neuroscience interesting to me.

As I said, I studied literature and I think literary output or artistic output is a way of trying to understand ourselves.

But that is like mediated by the work.

It's like a secondary object that's created by means of we can kind of try to extract some insights about humanity.

But when you're looking directly at neurons, which we believe at this point in time are responsible for our activity, there is a necessary self-reflection that's happening, like it is really the epitome of self-reflection and that feedback loop of like reflecting on looking at neurons that are looking at that are then looking at us, that are looking at neurons.

It's just like entranced me.

HEFFNER: What do you think Cajal would, would think of, of the state of neurobiology and our understanding today?

What would he, if anything, be surprised by in the advances of understanding since his death?

And, and what would he still want to find out that we don't know?

EHRLICH: It's important to just note that he was a curmudgeon.

So he probably wouldn't have liked a lot of things just because even as technology advanced towards the end of his life, he kept doing histology, this laborious process of dissection and staining and microscopy.

But I'd have to think that he would be enthralled by the imagery that we have now, clarity and FMRI.

I think that would titillate him.

I know that he wishes that he could have found the secret of consciousness.

Like I think every neuroscientist secretly wishes that, even if they won't admit it.

But I think there's something noble and kind of quixotic about knowing you can't find the secret of consciousness in your lifetime, and yet waking up every day and studying neurons anyway.

And that devotion and that vow is something that really attracted me to his character.

HEFFNER: What is that enigma still, when you refer to a secret that still hasn't been uncovered?

Because I feel like a lot of study and data points are out there at this point.

So what is still the question of the secret of consciousness?

EHRLICH: I am, again, no expert, but I guess it like why is green green?

Why do we see green when we, when we look at a green thing.

We may know mechanically like how from comatose state to wakefulness, you know, what kind of transitions are happening there, but we don't know why the world appears the way it does to us.

HEFFNER: So perception of surroundings and to some extent behavior too.

EHRLICH: Yeah.

Everything, you know, why, right?

Like just internal experience, internal subjective experience, like the whole sort of theater of the universe that we experience.

How does that come to be?

HEFFNER: Great.

Well, I encourage all of our listeners and viewers to check out Ben's work and his study of the dreams of Cajal and, and the biography of Cajal in The Brain in Search of Itself, Santiago Ramon Cajal, and the Story of the Neuron.

Benjamin Ehrlich, thank you so much for your insight today.

EHRLICH: Thank you so much for having me.

It was a pleasure.

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