We’ve all heard the phrase “it’s not brain surgery.” But what exactly is brain surgery? It’s a profession that is barely a hundred years old and profoundly connects two human beings, but few know how it works, or its history. How did early neurosurgeons come to understand the human brain—an extraordinarily complex organ that controls everything we do, and yet at only three pounds is so fragile? And how did this incredibly challenging and lifesaving specialty emerge?
In this warm, rigorous, and deeply insightful book, Dr. Theodore H. Schwartz explores what it’s like to hold the scalpel, wield the drill, extract a tumor, fix a bullet hole, and remove a blood clot—when every second can mean life or death. Drawing from the author’s own cases, plus media, sports, and government archives, this seminal work delves into all the brain-related topics that have long-consumed public curiosity, like what really happened to JFK, President Biden’s brain surgery, and the NFL’s management of CTE. Dr. Schwartz also surveys the field’s latest incredible advances and discusses the philosophical questions of the unity of the self and the existence of free will.
A neurosurgeon as well as a professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, one of the busiest and most highly ranked neurosurgery centers in the world, Dr. Schwartz tells this story like no one else could. Told through anecdote and clear explanation, this is the ultimate cultural and scientific history of a literally mind-blowing human endeavor, one that cuts to the core of who we are.
Theodore Schwartz, MD, is the David and Ursel Barnes Endowed Professor of Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, one of the busiest and highest-ranked neurosurgery centers in the world. He has published over five hundred scientific articles and chapters on neurosurgery, and has lectured around the world—from Bogotá to Vienna to Mumbai—on new, minimally invasive surgical techniques that he helped develop. He also runs a basic science laboratory devoted to epilepsy research. He studied philosophy and literature at Harvard. His new book is: Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery.
Shermer and Schwartz discuss:
- Brief biographical history of how he became a brain surgeon and how you can too
- A brief anatomical lesson on the brain and nervous system
- How does anesthesia work and where does consciousness go?
- Wilder Penfield and brain mapping
- Head-on collisions and brain injuries
- Sports neurosurgery
- CTE, Football, Boxing, concussions, etc.
- Brain tumors and how to treat them: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), Meningioma
- Cancer vs. tumors
- Strokes and aneurysms
- Cell phones and brain tumors
- Famous cases: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Johnny Cochrane, John McCain, Muhammad Ali, Ted Kennedy, H.M. (Henry Molaison), Phineas Gage, Andre the Giant, Joe Biden, Jim Brady, Eva Paron, Michael J. Fox, Lance Armstrong, Natasha Richardson
- Memory loss, dementia, senility, Alzheimer’s, etc.
- Frontal lobotomies: 1935–1955 over 60,000 were performed
- The neuroscience of violence and aggression: Donta Page, Mr. Oft, Charles Whitman
- Free will and determinism
- Sentience, consciousness, and the hard problem
- The Self: Theseus’s Ship (how much of the brain would need to change for loss of self?)
- Hindsight bias and how we justify our beliefs and behaviors
- His father’s stroke and death
- Neurolink and the future of computer-brain interface technology.
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This episode was released on September 24, 2024.
