The Excitable Membrane

Like James, Cajal is a master expositor of scientific ideas. He grounds us in “didactic” examples of relatively simple nervous to illustrate basic principles, and then builds on these through successive approximations, gradually climbing the phylogenetic ladder. Today it’s not really fashionable (or correct) to talk about ‘lesser’ and ‘lower’ forms, but as a pedagogical Read more

So, we’re setting aside James for a bit, and moving on to the first chapter of Cajal’s Textura. Whereas James is an explorer of inner life in the sense of that which is available to introspection, Cajal explores the inner, skull-bound world which is visible with a microscope. He wants to understand how neurons (brain Read more

This is a little bit of an oddball section where James talks about cerebral blood supply, and where he weighs in on the issue of the unique role of phosphorous in thought (evidently this was contended strongly enough in his time that it gets a special mention here). We have such an inflated and mystical Read more

Yeah, I know. I’ll confess I find it pretty hard to get pumped about studying reaction times. It seems James is a kindred spirit here, noting that the literature on it is the “sort of work which appeals particularly to patient and exact minds.” But since reaction time is one of the few toeholds he Read more

(So, I lied when I said in my original blog post that we’d trade off between James and Cajal a chapter at a time. I’m going to move on to chapter 3 of The Principles because in many ways it’s a continuation of the previous one. I suspect that for the presently –well– ‘lean’ readership Read more