Projections

Chapter 5

The Faraday Cage

Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel. Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch
 

The new thoughts came with all the surety of a change in season, in a gathering together of signs. Like the air of early fall, the first few weeks seemed to bring a shift in pressure in her mind, with a hint of wind revealing itself a shimmering of her highest leaves, a rustling in the neural canopy.
 
She could feel the change in her skin as well, a subtle tingle, a chill of early fall. The sensation stirred a memory from a dozen years ago: Wisconsin in September, with her brothers AJ and Nelson, chasing Canada geese along the lakeside. Winnie had been seventeen after that summer of lymphoma chemo. Nothing had ever felt so charged as her return to the outdoors that fall after methotrexate all around her and within her, even to her lungs, and to her brain, a mist of the season had seemed infused, clear and crystalline. In remission they had said, a likely cure, and they were right.
 
But this time, with the rustling of the leaves, unsettling intimations had come, borne high and kitelike on the same ghost wind and there was a feeling of openness, of vulnerability, that was not entirely posi­tive. She abruptly decided to take a month off, which was unprece­dented for someone with her caseload. The team muttered, including her supervisor, but Winnie had built serious credibility, even a kind of  celebrity, winning allowance after allowance, constructing patent es­tates

Karl Deisseroth is a professor of bioengineering and psychiatry at Stanford University. The winner of the Kyoto Prize and the Heineken Prize, Deisseroth has five children and lives near Stanford University, where he teaches and directs Stanford s undergraduate degree in bioengineering and treats patients with mood disorders and autism.

Because of his experiences as a physician and researcher, Dr. Deisseroth recognizes the limitations of science and medicine and the transcendent value of elemental human connection. . . . In life s most difficult moments, it might be everything. The Wall Street Journal

Deisseroth achieves the difficult feat of moving and enlightening the reader at the same time. The Guardian

[Karl Deisseroth s] imaginative narrative flows effortlessly. . . . There is a first love of reading and writing and hints of a literary imagination that draws on James Joyce and Toni Morrison. . . . His narratives are always sensitive. . . . An admixture of fact and fiction, reality and imagination, damage and desire. Science

Poetic, mind-stretching, and through it all, deeply human. Daniel Levitin, New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind

Karl Deisseroth intertwines neuroscience and human stories in a way that is altogether new: technical, lyrical, and deeply compassionate all at once.This is a crucial book for anyone who loves science, anyone who loves someone who is suffering from a disorder of the brain, or anyone who, like so many of us, loves both. Lucy Kalanithi

Projections asks probing questions about some of our most fundamental human traits to shed light on the origins of our emotions. Why, for instance, do we shed tears? How did this show of weakness survive millennia of evolution? Deisseroth writes of heartbreaking and desperate medical cases with a doctor s knowledge and a novelist s skill for narrative. I was fascinated, and could not put this book down. May-Britt Moser, Nobel Laureate

We are living during a revolution in our understanding of the human brain, and Karl Deisseroth has been at the forefront of these advances. This magisterial work, Projections,  shows that not only is he one of our leading scientists, but also a gifted writer and storyteller. With precise yet