We have performed meta-analyses of brains lit with love and desire. Neuroscientists want more than ever to chart the brain’s navigable waters, its every tributary and purling riffle. Perhaps we have become too easily ashamed of our wonder. We could not have anticipated that we would discuss his strange question and our awkward silence for the next 20 years. Maybe it was the way light and sound leapt from the stream, at once constant and unpredictable. ‘You’re a neurobiologist,’ he began, as I watched the Vermillion River work its way across a flat Illinois acre. And despite my ignorance, he addressed me with deference. He showed me how to move through the water to drive fish into our net. He taught me how to hold the seine, placing my hands on the posts in proper position, tilting them so the net could billow behind me. We were led by an ichthyology professor who was opinionated and clever. Roughly a year later, I joined several graduate students for an afternoon spent kicking our way through ankle- and waist-deep waters, seining for tiny varieties of fishes. This is the allure of neuroscience: it offers an atlas of experience, one whose pages can be laid out for view with a scalpel and steady hand. We might be asked to diagram the flow of information as a child touches a hot stove then withdraws her hand in a thin sliver of a second. In an exam, we might find pins in the pons and medulla, in their minor partitions. We sketched coarse outlines to label in Latin and Greek. My lab partner and I spent a semester peeling away layers of our stranger’s accumulated experience. Our lab manual depicted a brain in situ, half-exposed in the head of an aged Irishman cut open along the midline, where his part might have run. As a student of neuroanatomy, I was provided with a human brain in a half-gallon tub.
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