Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide. Robert Newman

overhead taking photographs. The hope was that when these photographs were developed in Berlin, the German High Command would take one look at them and say: ‘There’s no point trying to invade Britain, the whole country’s made out of craft materials.’

      Smiling was big in the Enlightenment. Humphry Davy and Thomas Paine, Diderot and d’Alembert can be seen smiling in their portraits. Julien Offray de la Mettrie is not only grinning but also wearing what appears to be a shower cap. To the sculptor Houdon, the twinkle in Voltaire’s eye was so intrinsic that it inspired a piece of witty improvisation when he came to do a bust of him. Houdon cemented a tiny stone onto each eye of his Voltaire bust. You’d think nothing could be further from a glint in the eye than a bit of gravel, but amazingly it works. Most people see the twinkle and not the grit of which it is made. And then of course there’s the famous oil painting of Volatire used on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Candide, bare-legged under his white cotton nightdress, grinning from ear to ear.

      Come the Romantics, however, and smiling was out. In Paris’s new photographic studios, Baudelaire was determined to make a decisive break with those grinning Enlightenment loons. No-one was going to catch him smiling at the birdie as the flash-gun whoompffed. No way. Not wanting to smile for the photographer or the oil painter doesn’t automatically make someone a poseur of course. Perhaps Baudelaire was more aware of life’s ugly reality than the Enlightenment optimists. Perhaps he had seen the world for what it really was, and not spent his life hopping excitedly around an air pump. Perhaps that was why he saw the fang beneath the smile. That’s certainly the pose Baudelaire strikes in his most famous poem Flowers of Evil (a title, you feel, that even Iron Maiden would reject), but there is a problem with the argument that Baudelaire is pessimistic because he has been around the block a few more times than those shallow Enlightenment optimists. The problem is that cock-a-hoop Julien ‘Is it all right if I keep my shower cap on for the picture?’ de la Mettrie was a battlefield surgeon in the War of Austrian Succession, whereas Baudelaire lived with his mum.

      As did Jean-Paul Sartre – for forty years! – which I think goes a long way in explaining the macho tone of his philosophising. If you are afraid of the dark, he says, it is because you choose to be afraid of the dark. Not Sartre. His last words every night, after being tucked up in bed, were: ‘Eteins la lumiere, Maman. J’ai choisi une vie sans peur!’

      ‘Are you sure, mon petit? Shall I leave the landing light on in case you don’t make it to the toilet in time and have a little ‘accident’ again like last night?’

      ‘I chose to wet myself. I enjoy the sensation of wet pyjama.’

      ‘Not in my house you don’t. When you move out and get a place of your own, you can piss all over it to your heart’s content, Jean-Paul, but as long as you live here the landing light stays on. And that’s final!’

      The Romantics and Baudelaire were by no means the first people ever to entertain strange ideas about smiling and laughter. For seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for instance, laughter came from a sense of ‘sudden glory arising from a feeling of superiority.’ Well, that is one sort of laugh. But do we crow like that when our child takes her first steps? Surely the laugh we laugh then comes from delight, not from a sudden sense of how immeasurably better at walking we are than her? We tend not to snap our fingers in her face, and say, ‘Call that walking? Hah! Oh dearey me! Woeful! Oh my sides!’

      Thomas Hobbes enjoyed the tremendous luck of getting to hang out with both Galileo and Ben Jonson. You’d think somewhere between Padua and Eastcheap, Hobbes might have noticed different kinds of laugh than the triumphant snort.

      So, there is a long history of curious ideas about smiling and laughing, yet none so strange as our new notion that smiling is an aborted snarl. Since Ramachandran is one of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in the World Today, then it is worth paying close attention to the specifically neuroscientific roots of this extraordinary notion.

      To this end we must unpick a tangled web that includes a famous industrial accident, a Gothic melodrama about a crazy scientist, and Bumpology, ‘The One True Science of The Mind.’

       5. PHINEAS GAGE AND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERMAX BRAIN

      In 1848, Vermont, USA, railroad worker Phineas Gage was tamping an explosive charge into a pre-drilled hole in a granite rock face in order to blast a cutting for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad. Sparks from his tamping iron set off the explosive charge, firing the 13lb iron bar clean through his skull, taking out what we would now call his pre-frontal cortex.

      Phineas Gage survived the accident to become an instant medical celebrity. When distinguished Harvard physicians came to study him, they were amazed to discover that he appeared to have suffered no mental impairment whatsoever. Except one. He was no longer able to behave in a socially appropriate way. He’d have sudden fits of rage characterised by the use of what the visiting Harvard physicians called ‘grossest profanity’. And that, say the textbooks brightly, is how we know that the pre-frontal cortex is the bit of the brain responsible for self-control, and for mediating socially appropriate behaviour.

      But nobody’s looking at this from Phineas Gage’s point of view! If I was him, I’d be saying:

      I’ve been listening to all you eminent physicians puzzling over what could possibly be causing my wild mood swings, and my regrettable slide into the use of gross profanity, and you know what’s just crossed my mind? An iron fucking bar. Now if a man cannot cuss when four feet of metal rod shish-kebabs his brain, when can he cuss? Trust me, when this happens to you, tarnation is not the word you are looking for. A darn won’t do you now. This is no Jumping Jehosaphat type of situ-fucking-ation. I nearly DIED!!!

      His life was saved by first responder Dr Edward Williams, who found Phineas sitting on his porch fully conscious despite the hole in his head, from which he removed, as he later wrote, coagulated blood, shards of splintered skull and ‘approximately three ounces of brain material’.

      Now what I want to know is how do you know when to stop taking the brain material out? I guess Dr Williams scooped out an ounce at a time. There’s Phineas sitting on the porch, and Dr Williams is standing over him with a tablespoon.

      Dr Williams: I can see some loose and flappy bits of brain in there, Phineas, that are gonna have to come out. Now I’m gonna scoop out an ounce at a time. If at any point it feels sketchy, you just holler and I will immediately desist. Okay. First ounce coming out now… Hup! How was that?

      Phineas: Didn’t feel a thing, Doc.

      Dr Williams: Right, Phineas. Here we go. Second ounce – hup! – out it comes! Okay?

      Phineas: Can’t say I feel any different at all, Doc. You go right ahead.

      Dr Williams: Okay third ounce. Third ounce coming out now, hup! How’s that?

      Phineas: I think the British people will welcome a state visit from President Trump.

      Dr Williams: Gotta put that third ounce back. That’s the soul right there! That’s what separates us from the baboon. You need that third ounce!

      Almost all brain science books tell the Phineas Gage story. But it is strange that those who claim to be experts on how the mind works should be unable to grasp that this young man’s state of mind might be down not just to his tattered brain but to what he thinks and feels about his tattered brain. Neuroscientific accounts never entertain the possibility that Phineas’s rage might be due to grief or shock or even simple pain from his shattered jaw and eye-socket. Instead, they tell the story of Phineas Gage as illustrating a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde model of the human brain. There’s the snarling Mr Hyde, our animal self, the killer ape inside, the product of millions of years of evolution, the real us, barely restrained by Dr Jekyll, the late cortical add-on, product of a few thousand years of flimsy social contract. The iron bar that shoots through Phineas Gage’s skull rips a hole in this cortical crust allowing the sociopathic Mr Hyde to escape Dr Jekyll. Strange to say this has become the standard scientific model in all neuroscience textbooks, the curtain-raiser on the study of cortical localisation, the