Lecture on Santiago Ramón y Cajal

so we'll be talking about kahal now for the next hour hour and a half and everyone in my audience is going to know who kahal is to some extent because usually Neuroscience have some sort of first lecture where they say here's a neuron and it was drawn by Kahan that show one of his beautiful drawings and then you kind of move on 5 seconds later um so he's he's weirdly enough one of these figures that's at least to someone with my background very famous and also largely unknown and you wrote a fantastic biography of him and so I guess we'll be going through that uh today and I thought I'd start by just reading kind of two short quotes uh from my biography to kind of set a little bit the scene about kind of K's contributions and also part of why he is interesting to talk about not only from a scientific but also from a personal perspective so first quote is by Hol Gren however you pronounced that who I think was part of the committee when he won the Nobel Prize and he said Kahala has not served science by singular Corrections of observations by others or by adding here and there an important observation to our stock of knowledge but it is he who has built almost the whole framework of our structure of thinking in which the less fortunately endowed forces have had to and will still have to put their contributions and then I think in the book just a few pages before uh before that you wrote when it came out that he won the Nobel Prize you wrote All who had known the Nobel Prize winner as a young delinquent responded with the same expression utter shock so um with that kind of as a as a little Preamble I think I've rarely read a biography in which a single person other than the you know person being uh written about was so imposing as kah's father uh who seems to have been a real figure and I think you said he was uh he would have been the hero of the family if it hadn't been for Santiago Ral so maybe maybe I think we kind of almost have to start there with who is Cal's father just a little bit about him his background um maybe to the point where kahal was born sure all of this is taking place in the mountains of Northern Spain in communities that were about 90% illiterate that includes kah's father he stopped going to school at a young age in order to work in the fields for his family he was not the first born so he did not have an inheritance coming his way which she figured out and decided to move to a different village and Apprentice as a barber surgeon and barber surgeons at that time were a lowly medical class they were not educated formally and they would do procedures like pulling teeth and Lancing boils and things like that that were really not not appealing to other doctors but he was so driven that he taught himself to read went to medical school became a second class surgeon in and then moved back to his um ancestral home and uh ended up fathering kahal and uh his younger brother so he really set this example of ambition and drive and willfulness which were what accommodated Cal's education and upbringing but also created a lot of tension because kahal himself was also willful and uh determined and ambitious but his father's story of starting as an ill illiterate Shepherd's assistant to becoming uh he eventually got his PhD um much many years later so it's really an amazing story in and of itself yeah yeah I mean that's the it's it's yeah it's it's really fascinating how you have this like mini biography of someone who's who feels like is almost as interesting as a person trying to biography about than the person you actually can then write about I I I I particularly liked I think you said you can suiz him with a saying that is if you give an aranes man a nail to drive he would rather use his head than a hammer and that also seem to summarize him pretty well yeah uh yeah I mean I was for me it was also fascinating just the whole I mean I knew basically nothing about how medicine was practiced in the 19th century I guess I heard about blood letting and that kind of stuff but the idea of a barber surgeon and then these different classes of Surgeons uh let's just say I'm glad that's not the way it is today anymore yeah I mean there were you know Dime dime horror novels where Barber surgeons were the villains you know that they were it was a really terrifying profession if you have to go to the barber surgeon you're really putting your life in in someone almost like a faith healer they were performing these cures that were very very rustic let's say so as you said then you know start with k himself um I mean his father's going to as we talk about Carl's childhood he's going to come back a few times um yeah and as you mention a lot of this takes place in very rural Northeastern Spain I think was it shington called him a peasant genius because he really grew up in like I mean now I looked at the Wikipedia article to what's it called ptia Aragon uh I mean I think now it's I think it used to be a bit more lively when he was around now it's like 50 people or something it's a ghost it's a ghost town no basically nobody lives there I went there and I didn't find a single person so yeah so what was it like when uh kahal grew up there I mean it was it just you know everyone had a you know a bit of land few animals maybe and people there that was it it was really hard to it was really tough soil because it was this like these like terrist plots on the side CU it's on it's on a it's on a Foothill of the Pyrenees so everyone would have like a little bit of land on the side of the hill and there were maybe about I don't know a few hundred people that live there and yeah the barber surgeon also gave haircuts and stuff like that you know so it's a real but but a but a key figure in the community yeah the combination is just it's just like well you've got something to cut you might as well do both yeah exactly so what did kahal do as a as a young boy U what was he up to he he wandered around looking at nature every chance that he could when he was very young he hated school he had a visual like his genius was his visual memory but he couldn't remember words very well so I think that in today's schooling pedagogy we might call him that someone with a learning difference so because of his stubbornness combined with the learning difference he rebelled against all of his teachers and at a certain point started drawing and decided he wanted to be an artist which his father disapproved of to say the least so they sent him they sent him to a Jesuit school where he was beaten his father beat him also so there's a lot of trauma in his childhood from the treatment of of him by his Elders he basically never let go of his dream of being an artist he just applied it to Scientific objects rather than natural landscapes different natural landscapes let's say yeah well um I mean so this is also a theme that we'll probably come back to a few times in the conversation which is how I guess Spanish people viewed themselves at the time uh because it seems to me that it's it's not much of a coincidence that U or it kind of makes sense at least that kahal wanted to be a painter rather than a scientist um I I think you know as we'll come to as I said a little bit later it seemed like almost when he then decided to become a scientist part of what he wanted to do was to show that Spaniards can even be scientists so I'm just curious kind of what was the just to kind of because it's so unlikely that kahal like someone like him would become one of the most famous scientists so just want to paint a little bit more kind of the picture of what he what kind of his mindset was growing up and kind of how he thought about maybe himself and what he could do um so could you tell you a little bit more about kind of like how people from Spain or particularly from his region kind of saw themselves and what they thought was possible yeah well Spain in general had not produced an internationally famous scientist and uh Aragon in in particular had never produced uh like when kahal was the chair of anatomy at the Central University in Madrid he was the first aragan to hold that position so Aragon was kind of like the sticks they they were considered to be Hicks according to the rest of the of urban Spain but his father Cal's father believed that it was possible for him to achieve to become a scientist so he actually started teaching him French as a young boy because he anticipated that kaha would need that on on the world stage as a scientist or well not as a scientist mostly he was anticipating kaha would become a famous doctor but if you think about the foresight of that from from a from the point of view of his father it's it's incredible it's it's such an Underdog Story on so many levels that kah was Spanish that he was from Aragon that he was from this Tiny Village that his father happened to be this guy who had such ambition and drive and will so despite his difficulty with formal schooling he did re he did receive this education by example from his father who also brutally punished him so I think psychically his father was a very complicated figure for for kahal yeah I mean you you said that he you know had has education by example but what I think was I mean also goes through his entire childhood and I mean even up to his PhD um is that kah's father really wanted I mean trained basically his own son and I I hadn't there was one paragraph again that I wrote out because I thought it was it's almost like a little it's almost like a short story in and of itself um then it cap capitulates a lot of this so like to read that too um she wrote in 1857 uh when K was five Spain passed its first comprehensive education reform requiring every child to enroll in school at the age of six H started educating Santiago by the way is it Santiago yeah that's his the childhood nickname santiag uh a year early hu's contract required him to treat patients as soon as he found out that they were sick and so he would lead Santiago away from the town where no one could find him in the dry scraggly Fields they discovered a small dark cave so small that hustle a stout broad shouldered man carrying an abacus and a globe would have bent down to step through narrowing opening there were no chairs only rocks and Santiago and his imposing father must have sat KNE to knee in the cramped space I mean I think there's so much that's great about this just one paragraph starting with the fact that his father would just like go somewhere so his patients couldn't find him yeah um but yeah can you tell say a little bit more about kind of this again as I said his father was so imposing and in one in in part of the sense was that he it seemed like throughout his early life if he just tried to teach him meds everything he knew about meds him and turn him into a doctor himself yeah he believed in kajal's intelligence which is part but he didn't understand his learning style until much later so because kahal couldn't remember Latin declensions and conjugations and but he could draw a map if he saw a map once he could draw it perfectly after that so there were all these uh specific strengths and weaknesses of kajal's intellect that his father knew better than anyone else and he cared his father for all of his flaws cared so deeply about education which was so rare in that climate in that mil and I think that he kahal could never get away from his father his father's influence and even his father's presence as they his father moved the family around to uh wherever kahal was was working as an adult so it was a complicated relationship and I think that there's no way kahal would have achieved his Heights without his father but it came at a CO it came at a real psychic cost obviously I mean his father died and kahal kahal doesn't doesn't mention his father's death in in his autobiography at all he doesn't say a single word about how he felt about it or you know so it's a little bit like conspicuous in its absence yeah yeah and uh I mean you mentioned he could get away from him if I remember correctly he also made kahal do his PhD in zagosa rather than in Madrid so he was close by yeah he made him study in zaragosa because he was worried about the return of his artistic uh Ambitions it was like art art was like the enemy to his father and it was only it was only when they worked together on an anatomical Atlas that his father understood the value of kajal's talent um because you know when he was younger he was just painting pictures of churches and uh women and um mountains and things like that but then once he found real objects for his drawings like you know when they started studying osteology and anatomy and histology that that's when it became apparent to his father that the talent was very useful yeah was this weird almost heartwarming moment I felt like when you felt like the father could suddenly like for the first time see some sort of worth in the thing that he tried to beat out of his childh all his life um but I don't know it's not exactly heartwarming either it's a yeah it it's so much of H's story is about trauma that he doesn't talk about U my first book was a translation of his dream diaries with which he tried to disprove Freud's theories but he quite obviously did not because there was so much unconscious that he was refusing to acknowledge and I think that that's true if you read his autobiography and you know his brother attests to how Savage the beatings of their F uh by their father were and again when he went to this Jesuit school they beat him and they locked him in freezing rooms without food and I mean this is there was a a saying in Spain at the time Ena which means knowledge comes with blood so it was not abnormal for kids to be abused but for for kahal to get at both that school and from his father whom he idolized I think was very I keep saying complicated but that's the best word yeah I mean as I said the complication I mean part of it is because it does feel like really you know he really then later with with science and Neuroscience in particular or histology that of the brain uh really found something that he you know was completely obsessed with and you know if I think I mean correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's fair to say he wouldn't have done any signs if it hadn't been for his father absolutely he would he says in his autobiography that he would have ended up being like a second rate romantic painter that nobody would have remembered so yeah he owes he owes his father that um he for sure he owes his father that so moving on a little bit I it was still kind of one thing I found kind of slightly confusing almost was that it seemed like G never really had good grades but somehow he still managed to get into University and into do medicine and all that kind of stuff um was that just how did that work back was it just because his father was a doctor or like how did it seemed like this weird disconnect where somehow he then ended up up studing medicine even though who would basically let him in it was his father I remember one time in high school they wanted to expel him and there was a committee that was going to rule on it and his father had operated on the wife of one of the people on the committee so kahal got to stay in high school so his father was watching over him the whole time and as kahal was advancing in his education his father was accumulating more influence because of his own advancement it's like so yeah his father was basically watching over and kahal once he got to college his grades got better because you know descriptive Anatomy he really thrived in for example and he didn't care about any of the other subjects really than that but it was good enough to graduate I suppose yeah I mean so they maybe told me I mean so the the the thing that I find kind of interesting also was that uh I don't know exactly where it happens but in the in the in your book it takes about I don't know a third of it until maybe even more than the third maybe 40% or something until the brain like first basically enters his life because he you know didn't have anything to do with the brain until that point so maybe can you can you kind of take us through him studying medicine and kind of what he was the first kind of why he did science and not clinical practice and then kind of what the first um what is what his first kind of scientific Works were in sure he never wanted to practice medicine his father wanted him to practice medicine there were times in his life where his father actually did force him to take a post clinically different Villages and that didn't last very long kajal's fascination with the human body was aesthetic first and foremost he started his father started by studying osteology and kahal found that it was just a good subject for his pictures and then when he studied oology is bones righton stud bones and um once he started studying anatomy and especially microscopic Anatomy he found like a whole world of the invisible of the infinitely small as he put it and so what he was wanted to do is Elevate Spanish science by creating a textbook of histology the study of tissues because every book that he read was by a foreign author and he wanted Spaniards have somebody they could look up to so as he was going through and and Performing you know all these hystological studies of every part of the human body he came to the brain and he realized that there was no good picture of the brain so again it started with an image or the lack of an image and so he undertook to create so just briefly this would be in 1880 something like that yeah in the 1880s in the 1880s so you know not to mention that it was the most contested scientific Arena at the time because there was the reticular Theory which held that the brain was composed of a continuous fiber that was fused together and what kahal discovered is that the brain is composed of individual cells just like everywhere else else in the body for some reason cell theory was established in 1838 I believe but of all the living forms the the the brain was the only one that was thought to be composed of a different substance so so what kahal did is he kind of like completed the cell theory by discovering what waly are coined as neurons the basic unit of the nervous system and he did that through histology which again is dissecting tissue treating it with a fixative and staining it based on different uh chemical reactions that would leave a residue on the architecture of the cell that would show up on a microscope when you look through it so that was his practice but he he initially started doing it because of the lack of an image of the brain in a textbook that he wanted to put out yeah maybe why did why did they think the brain was diff was exempt from cell theory almost it wasn't that they theoretically I what I believe so first of all there was an an inadequacy and technique all the stains for cells were inadequate so for example there were some stains that only stain the cell bodies but then you know because there are nerve fibers that stem from from cell bodies in the brain in the nervous system you wouldn't be able to trace them because the stain would only take hold in the cell body there were other stains that stained everything but because the brain is so dense with fiber you would basically be looking at a blob of color and not be able to distinguish anything from anything else what kahal used was a technique called the GGI stain which was invented by someone else that he Cal perfected which R uh randomly they people still don't know why this is it random ly stands between 1 and 5% of cellular matter so it kind of like takes away the noise and you can just follow a single cell's fiber all the way to the end which is what kahal did he followed a fiber to see if it was connected to another fiber and because it ended freely he concluded that that meant that nerve cells were independent how just cous just at from like today's perspective like how good was I mean because from that he builds the whole neuron Doctrine and that neurons are separate from each other um how good was the evidence that he actually got at the time uh because especially in his early work I mean one thing we can also talk about a little bit is just how how poor the resources were that kah had available to him not only uh by today's standard but also at the time um but like how good was actually because I mean because in a way he's saying like there is no connection which and stating like the presence of an absence in a sense is in a way harder than you know it seems like the kind of finding where you could easily say well you just didn't quite there's something else that connects it or something like that well it wasn't conf it wasn't confirmed unequivocally until the 1930s with the electron microscope where they declared they they actually saw the Gap with an electron microscope and declared that kahal had been right at the time I think it was because people because of the cell theory because it made sense that there would be cells in the brain just like everywhere else and I think just the clarity and the power of His images you know he he won scientists over literally at a conference by calling them over to his table and having them look through his microscope and everybody was completely amazed because everyone had been trying to stain brain tissue in various ways they had given up on the Gogi stain it was like 15 years old at that point so people had given up on that and then Here Comes This Anonymous Spaniard with like his terrible friendch that he's his father taught him to speak in a cave when he was 5 years old and he's like come look at my samples come look at my samples and they blew everybody away maybe you can elaborate a little bit on this that basically first he he you know made these discoveries and was ignored like no one cared and it was fascinating to me that there was just this one moment basic basically in his life that seemed to well this this one moment that seemed to completely change his life um so could you maybe tell the story about yeah I can't remember what it's cool but it's one conference where ker uh went went up to him and basically then convinced everyone else to have a look yeah it was 1889 this International anatomical Congress in Berlin and kahal who never had a lot of money but always spent every extra Penny on supplies and his wife deserves a lot of credit a lot a lot of credit for her support and her sacrifice of some some Essentials in order for him to pursue his research so he basically spent all of his savings to take a third rate train not Third Rate train but in the third class he was traveling in third class holding a suitcase with his microscope and his slides and he shows up at the conference and they give him a table in the in the back corner cuz he's a nobody and people are streaming by looking at different presentations and he's trying to call out to them in French but his French is terrible again I just find it so funny and touching that it's like his father has was trying to prepare him for that moment it was like that's why his father taught him French in a cave he's like his father's like one day you're going to be at a conference and blah blah blah blah blah but finally he got ker who was like the the leading anat the person who was the most respected in the field at that time he got him to look through the microscope and he flipped out and he got everyone else to look through the microscope and what what they saw was a freely ending nerve fiber plain and simple and he had evidence from the retina from the cerebellum from the cortex and so he was proving this kind of like all across the nervous system in these different areas and a lot of these people that saw his slides converted to what became known as the neuron Doctrine where they all followed his lead and tried to prove the existence of neurons in every single part of the nervous system but it was a highly I I don't know what would have happened if he hadn't gotten caker to come over to his table world world history would have been different yeah part of me wondered that too because it's yeah basically what would have happened if not part of me thinks like he would have just might have a bit longer like he would have just like powered through but um yeah maybe a brief word about ker because he's someone who I mean I grew up in Germany I'd never heard of and I mean maybe they mentioned him in school but I didn't really listen much so that was maybe on me but he's he's at least not a famous figure in Germany um his Wikipedia article was pretty short uh but as you said he was like one of the leading anatomists at the time uh so maybe who was he and and why did he even have a look at kahal slide if he was one of the most famous people at the entire conference he is someone who was trying to solve the same problem of the composition of brain matter and so I think that he had had an open enough mind to investigate a potential solution that nobody had attempted before so I think that's to his credit I think you know his textbook is one of the ones that didn't include a very good image of the brain that kahal had so I think he was a little bit skeptical of the reticular Theory and so again had an open enough mind to and became a champion of kahal like he said I have just he said to kahal I have discovered you and he brought him to the hotel at the dinner and he was parading him around and all of this and I don't I I don't know much about him beyond that either um but he played an important part in the story and if I remember correctly he even didn't he even like then end up learning Spanish so I mean this is one of the funniest things to me is that um it kind of shines through so I mean the one thing I did read about uh Baha was his invest what's it called histology of the nervous system of advice for young investigator oh yeah um you know I read that in my Masters or something like that and the one thing I found kind of funny from that is that he mentioned you had to learn like German and Italian and French and English if you wanted to follow the you know something that's very outdated today um but what I found really funny and almost endearing is that as you mentioned kahar almost spent most of his money on his signs and in particular he printed so maybe can he printed he he created his own journal or something like that and then printed off his own papers and then in Spanish sent them to people internationally who then obviously didn't read it because they didn't speak Spanish yeah but if I remember correctly K actually then ended up didn't he say like he learned Spanish so he could so he could translate it yeah translate even yeah yeah so like he really went beyond just uh as you said he really championed findings totally totally by the way just in aside one thing I found kind of funny is that you know you read about a world that seems so far away yet the lenses were made by T which is still one of the yeah most respected lens men makers today and he owned a Kodak camera which I think Kodak like really messed up like 20 years ago something like that but it was it was really random seeing like these two companies that are still very famous yeah it is appear this mography about some 13 years ago um I mean so we've talked about about his discoveries and that kind of stuff I mean this was the initial Discovery basically right but then kind of he did much more in the let's say in the 1890s what was he trying to do yeah where where did his research take him he wanted to understand how the brain functions also by deducing from its structure so he came up with a theory he called Dynamic polarization which is basically that the signals received by dendrites transmitted through the cell body and then through axons to the next cell he didn't know about synapses at the time and he he doesn't write about synapses at all but he just deduced that by the way that cells were the neurons were arranged in various parts of the of the brain so he was concerned with function then he started studying the early like the embryonic stages of neur neuron development and he so so he discovered what are called growth cones and growth cones are these structures at the very tip of fibers that are trying to wind their way through the nervous system to make their final connection that was a huge Discovery that's still extremely fruit now these days and he studied the degeneration and regeneration of the nervous system especially the central nervous system in the brain he he did not believe that the brain could be regenerated but he he also left it open to future scientists to correct him and that's actually if anyone's listening who thinks that kahal shut the door on the possibility of regeneration in the brain he didn't he he said he said he couldn't find it but that someone else might be able to overturn him he also was the first person to use the term plasticity to refer to the central nervous system so he was he was interested in behaviors like learning and memory and how the how the structure of the brain would accommodate that and that was one of the main critiques his his main critiques of the reticular theory is that if the brain is composed of a single continuous uh fixed fiber how would learning and memory be reflected in that if there was no change yeah I mean we so we talked a little bit about kind of what his what his life was like in his childhood but now he's what's his life like now I mean it's one thing that's kind of surprised me but maybe that's just because it's in hindsight everything kind of sees OB obvious is that how much he kind of struggled to become a professor and he had these what are they called again the um opposition opposition yeah exactly how he those didn't necessarily work out in his favor uh but yeah can you kind of maybe talk a little bit kind of like how is the reception of him in Spain kind of changed basically throughout his scientific career well people in Spain still weren't aware of his discoveries in the 1880s and 1890s it really started when he won the Nobel Prize which was just such a huge deal because again he was the second Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize but the first one was in literature which again like as you alluded to before a much more traditionally Spanish Pursuit so so there it was kind of incredible and Spanish people were very proud that one of their own was being considered on the world stage in an arena that that people people were prejudiced against against Spaniards they didn't think that they could perform science because they were too hotheaded and passionate and what have you so kahal was proof that this that it was possible and so he became a famous person and very wealthy as well and uh he was living in Madrid he finally was able to achieve a Prof professorship at the Central University after years of failing in these oppositionists which are basically debates between candidates presentations rhetoric things that he wasn't very good at and they didn't even take into account very highly his uh foreign Publications or anything like that it was it was a very primitive way of determining who should what position but finally when he won the Nobel priz who was living in Madrid he bought a beautiful house next to rtio Park and uh a country house on the outskirts of Madrid but newspapers were obsessed with him there were profiles all the time people following him around his Nobel Prize win was chaos people were you know rushing after the train they were storming his balcony at all hours of the night it was it was really a huge deal yeah I was surprised that I mean I don't know the history of the Noel prize um uh in any detail but I was surprised at how because he won it in 1905 I believe or something that was six yeah but it was like four or five years after they started or something like that right so I I basically assumed that this was something like that The Prestige of the prize kind of grew over time and that like maybe you know it took a while but it seems that basically he you know very shortly after the was was was founded in that sense he won it and people just went nuts for it yeah they really did it's uh and he he was a very private person he didn't really care about Fame at all he just wanted to pursue his research that's all I mean he he I think it was nice for him to have some money finally for once but he was very modest and humble and very self-effacing he was a also an ego Maniac it should be said but um in public he really just wanted to be left alone yeah I mean I found um I found it funny what you said that he was also egomaniac because maybe not that surprisingly given what we talked about but he seemed like a very insecure person who really wanted a lot of recognition that kind of stuff he also seemed to really like also himself as it's you know at a time I guess when photography was so expensive you wouldn't expect someone to take that many self-portraits um but um that's a good point about the self-portraits though and I hadn't thought of the expense of Photography and how and how those self-portraits would would be would be costly yeah I mean if you know I I still remember that when I was a kid we had to you know you had like the the roles of the film you had to then go somewhere and they process it but like 100 years before that I don't know maybe he could do it or did he just do it himself maybe even but still he wasn't a rich man and took lots of photos of himself yeah yeah I mean I'd like to talk a little bit kind of about a bit more directly maybe about what he was like as a person because one thing that's kind of fascinating to me is that I mean in some ways he seems like a great subject for biography but in some ways he also doesn't because it seems like he just wanted to work most of the time and be left alone and he he didn't seem I mean he it seems like he if I remember correctly he took part greatly in the kind of Cafe called of the time um but he didn't seem like someone I don't know when I read it I had the impression he probably wouldn't be that much fun to hang out with yeah yeah so I was just K yeah he he had a rich inner life and uh when I read his autobiography early on in my in my process of writing this book I could sense his self-presentation and how he was hoping to be seen and also I could fill in the blanks about what he was leaving out or at least I could sense that there were blanks and so as a subject he was very complex because you could never take him at his word and yet he was the only source for a lot of information and I think that one thing I want to say about him is that he was a good person you know like he wasn't one of these people who was a monster he never mistreated people who were of a lower class than him or people that worked for him everybody the opposite fil no yeah I mean he basically treated the working class better than yeah he could thumb he could thumb his nose at an at an aristocrat he the king once called for an audience with him and he blew him off for like 15 days but everybody who interact the waiters at the cafe his chauffeur all these people gave testimony you know about the way that he treated them he was very absent as a father because he was working so much but his kids remember him as as loving and he didn't perpetuate the cycle of violence that his father had begun so I enjoyed yeah I enjoyed not writing about a a person who was sort of secretly he did a lot for women in science I know that advice to a young investigator comes off as as a little bit sexist in today's age but the truth of the matter is he's he he had women scientists that he allowed to be le authors of papers at a time when that was completely unheard of so just a little just a little note about his character yeah yeah that's it's a fair point yeah yeah it's it's not that yeah you don't get the impression that he's a bad person but it's more that uh he just he seems very dry maybe that's it like if I let's say if I was going to do an interview with him I think he would be a lot of work on my part yeah it it would be for sure he he had a dry arogan sense of humor it's hard to pin down exactly what that means but people referred to a sense of humor as arogan it was dry and also tended towards the dark in terms of his humor he he wrote a ton I mean he wrote his scientific books he wrote short stories he wrote an autobiography um so he really and he really relished Solitude he was someone who preferred being alone to being with other people which I think is why your interview with him would be less interesting than if he were alone and you could listen to his thoughts somehow yeah it's one of those things where it's probably good that I'm talking to the biographer rather than him directly maybe but I mean he he might I don't know who knows I mean because I mean one thing I also found interesting is that if I remember I think early on when he gave lectures remember correctly there was some people who said like I just like what's the point of going to the lectures I'd rather read his books but then if I remember correctly like a few years later there were like his classes became very pop like before he like want an over priz anything like that his classes became very popular and there was this letter or I think that his students wrote to him that you included yeah where they just really I think they called him like a father figure to them and all that kind of stuff yeah yeah the the people who were truly interested in histology he was he was their hero but you know 95% of a intro to hystology class in medical school don't care about hystology so they were climbing climbing out of the windows to get away did he care about that I can't remember no he never care he never cared he would just draw a a spiral in his notebook that looked like a bacterium and that would mean that you were absent I see uh I feel like we have to talk at least briefly about Camilo GOI however you pronounce that uh just because it is I guess one of the more famous scientific fights is too strong um but but uh it's kind of quite amusing it's in particular what happened at the Noel priz lectures which is something I've I've not quite seen like that um can you maybe talk a little bit about kind of in general how they what the interaction was over the time you already mentioned that he used and maybe refined Go's method um yeah so GOI invented this stain in the kitchen of the mental hospital where he was working in I think 1870 3 and he knew that it was going to be revelatory but it was erratic like sometimes it would produce artifacts that looked like fibers but weren't fibers sometimes it would say it would stain none of the cells sometimes it too many of the cells so he came to the erroneous conclusion that there was a reticulum just like the prevailing Theory at the time but then he moved on to study pathology and by the time that he was awarded the Nobel Prize he really hadn't looked at the nervous system in about a decade so he got up to the microphone to give a speech and he basically behaved as though nothing had happened in the last 20 years of so just briefly for context I mean they both won the no priz together and they were giving back-to-back speeches or some or different days I can't remember I think it was different days and um but they were both jointly awarded the Nobel Prize even though the committee favored kahal they thought that it was important to recognize the inventor of the stand but kahal tried to meet GOI he tried to go to pavio where he taught and then he tried to meet him at before the ceremony but he actually went to the train platform to meet gogi's train but gogi's wife there was some excuse about gogi's wife had fallen in an ice skating accident and they had to rush her home because she wasn't feeling well or something like that so from at least kah's perspective he he tried to be cordial and I think that they were cordial and I think that it was shocking for most of the neuroscientists in the room to hear GOI so out of touch but he in his own right was a great scientist so it's unfortunate that he has this reputation as the loser of this intellectual battle when really it's just like one one mistake one glaring and persistent mistake that he that he made in not recognizing the existence of the neuron and maybe is I mean he didn't remember correctly he so GOI went first with his yeah he gave the first lecture which is kind of important um and then he kind of just I mean he didn't exactly attack kahal but it it felt like he didn't need to be as explicit about how much he thought kahal was wrong yeah he definitely attacked the neuron Doctrine and he he reassert Ed the reticular Theory which had been declared basically dead for like I said 20 years maybe I think around 1891 most neuroscientists and psychologists were had adopted the neuron Theory so this is like 15 years later and yeah it it was just an odd surprising experience and kahal says that he he sort of restrained himself and in his own speech the next day didn't attack back he he just kind of asserted the findings his own findings that supported the neuron Theory well you say he didn't attack back but uh kind of the last quote I think I wrote out was uh the the the final how kak ended his speech uh so he said uh we mourn the scientist who in the last years of a life so well filled suffered the Injustice of seeing a falling of young experimenters treat his most elegant and original discoveries as errors yeah you're right Prett yeah I forgot about that yeah that is definitely a a burn yeah it's quite verose but I think it gets the point across quite well um uh yeah I mean one thing I also found kind of quite fascinating was then the parallels between the two in particular what I found fascinating was then how K kind of did something similar that GOI did to him um kah did to Del Rio who I believe worked in his lab um and yeah can you maybe talk about what Del Rio found and kind of how K treated the discoveries yeah Del Rio was one of his students and uh there was a type of cell that kahal found that that he called the third element mysterious third elements and now the name of that cell is escaping me what's the other cell the other type of cell other than neurons in the brain uh G cells yeah so he was so what he was what he was discovering was gleo cells Del Rio was discovering G cells and he was studying to elaborate on different kinds of G cells and kahal refused to come come off of his own designation as like mysterious third elements he he still believed that you couldn't distinguish between them and it was a very complicated relationship kahal treated Del Rio quite Cru actually before later apologizing but Del Rio is considered the father of G cells so he was a great great disciple of kahal yeah and I mean anyone who I mean I I once took like a mini course on G cells and I think deio found the ol good dendrites and the microa so it's it's not just like he found the Gia house but like two particular types of them um so like major discoveries in a way I'm surprised Delio isn't kind of more famous because of that but I I don't know I don't know but that's not a biography I'm going to write so someone else lost to do yeah as a kind of final and maybe uh slightly uh sadder end to we you we mentioned his relationship with his father earlier um how did that end when his mother was sick his father started an affair with a 20 something year old girl when he was in the 70s in impregnated her and kahal was so enraged that he stopped speaking to him each of his other siblings eventually forgave his father but kahal never did so they died not not on speaking terms he died his father died not in speaking terms it's like for decades right or I don't oh no he was 70 I guess he didn't live that long but just towards towards the end yeah and that's yeah it's kind of a weird moment I feel like in the book when Suddenly It's just like oh damn that kind of I it's not like they had much contact before that right I mean it's at least I mean maybe his influence wasn't as immediate so maybe that's why he didn't mention it as much but uh kind of once gal becomes an independent scientist his father's not that much in the book anymore for yeah you don't hear anything about his father once he moves away from zaragosa which is where his father lives I think his father helped pay for something here here and there um I think that was way of controlling him of controlling Kahala was through the P strings but no they they weren't like working side by side on an anatomical Atlas like they were when they were both in zaragosa so his his his influence did wne yeah I mean I'd like to you know kind of impar talk a little bit more about kind of what kahal was like and also uh what it was like for you writing a book about him you mentioned the difficulty in trusting Parts at at least or trusting lots of what Kar wrote in his autobiography um can you maybe talk a little bit about what I mean what's the a picaresque novel and uh why does that make it sometimes a little bit difficult to to trust everything K say about his own life the picaresque novel is a Spanish form that was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries I believe if not earlier where a sort of lower class Scamp survives by the skin of his teeth that's the expression and travels around getting into various trouble but ultimately surviving and moving on and kahal wanted to be like this like a like a romantic hero finding himself in these scrapes but getting out of it and he wrote his early part of of his autobiography to kind of mimic this this style where he's the incident in the orchard where he like steals fruit he blows down the Gate of one of his neighbors and gets away with it and so there is this stylization of his own and mythification of his own life based on the literature that he loved um I mean some of the ones where I think you mentioned earlier on that he everything from his childhood had to be kind of extreme like he made the best flutes the best slingshots or all that kind of stuff that that you know Shepherds wanted to buy and all that kind of stuff it's um but how kind of how do you deal with that as a biographer do you just look wherever you can you know for for third sources um and then kind of piece together what may or may not have been true or kind of because it's very difficult you know to I guess seems to me to write about someone who who died about 90 years ago or whatever and who liked who also wrote fiction yeah kind of how how do you figure out what's real and what isn't when data is a bit biased and maybe not that there's not that much data necessarily from different sources and it's not that reliable yeah you try you try when you can to find alternative sources and when you can't you just present the truth which is that he had a habit of presenting himself in a certain way for a certain reason and then you allow the reader to draw conclusions and at that point it almost doesn't matter if he really you know was thrown in jail for three days or five days or 15 days or not at all because what what we're understanding is not reality but his his view of reality so it matters less what actually happened as what he wished or willed to have happened in his own mind have to say your book has one of the more in more interesting ends to biography that I just just didn't expect because in the epilog you kind of talk a little bit about Rec themes and how um you can you maybe talk a little bit about how about the parallel between kahal um making drawings from composite images uh and kind of what you did as a biographer yeah kahal neurons never existed there are composits as you say of multiple observations of neurons that he synthesized into a singular image and so similarly my biography is presenting kahal as though he was a person who existed there was a person who existed in the in the same way that the multiply observed neurons existed but Mahal is a is a A reproduction of the various observations I made of him through my research so I I don't present a kahal as he existed I presented kahal as I studied and interpreted him from a composite of all these sources yeah um as a kind of very silly question but why write a biography about K I just fell in love yeah I just fell in love with this with him I just fell in love like many years ago and it just got stuck in my brain and I couldn't get over it I I thought it would make a great biography and I expected that someone else would write it and then after after about 5 years I realized no one was going to and I probably would have to do it myself and um it started with an image with the drawing one of his neuron drawings and I just needed to know the person behind that piece of art and then I read his autobiography and I saw that he was such a rich character and I just kept getting further and further down the rabbit hole until the book came out what did you think you needed that wasn't already in the autobiography of than maybe some sort of objectivity well yeah I I needed to understand the mind and the influences of a person who could create that piece of art because essentially his neuron drawings just like any artist it's an objective reproduction on one level but on the other level it is influenced by his life experience just like any other artist were so I wanted to know who he was and how that came to bear on his science and on his on his art yeah it's funny that you mentioned [Music] him the way you prr it now almost more as an artist than a scientist um because I there were um I think he had this quote that you quoted early on where he said only true artists are attracted to science and there was also description about the kind of students who in his lectures where he basically liked the people who did did Art and philosophy and all that kind of stuff and um those were the ones he really liked yeah I mean I just find it fascinating that he was kind of borderline forced into this line of research against his interests but then it ended up working out so perfectly because his actual interests then uh I guess they were complimentary to maybe what most people were taught and knew how and knew what to do you know the classic scientist who maybe wants to do medicine all time and reads in books and that kind of stuff is obviously going to look at the sales very differently than someone who maybe deep down actually wants to be a painter yeah yeah well that that's what I thought I thought that his neurons were in a way self-portraits I mean I don't want to go too far in in that you know obviously they they're not representative self-portraits but they are expressions they're self-expressions I believe um one of his disciples lorente Deno said that kaha would observe neurons in the morning then go for a walk in rtio park around noon and come back in the afternoon and draw them from memory so take that for what what you will but clearly there is a lot going on in between observation and reproduction there's a lot of interpretation going on and that's where the creative process is happening yeah and I think yeah I mean there's this to me also this really interesting kind of seeming conflict maybe at least um between supposedly objective truth and Science and this kind of personal subjectivity that the scientist brings into it that I think that whole topic kind of even though it's not usually expressed that explicitly in in y biography it's kind of still like a backdrop almost to to much of what's going on there yeah absolutely I mean it started with his father's iation of science and art art being a delinquent Pursuit and science being the Holy Grail basically I think that Cal's quote only true artists are attracted to science is like a middle finger to his father I think more than anything else but yeah there's it was so physical you know like he was handling the dissection and the stain and the ink and the um chemicals and all of that and it just it felt to me like so alive the process is so alive and it's not it's not something that a machine did it's something that a person did and his drawings are not like any other anybody else's drawings everybody has their own style you look at the other histologists from around this time all of them made beautiful work they all have different styles so I'm not CLA climing that I'm claiming that this is the perfect Confluence of science and art the fact that he made artistic drawings that are in neuroanatomy textbooks to this day is a testament to How Art and Science can coexist and and be mutually supportive yeah it's yeah it's basically he just made the perfect drawings even if we can have you have some that are more accurate it's like I mean for some purpose obviously you need the more accurate ones but for any kind of introduction to Neuroscience is like I mean what more do you want exactly but I'm just curious I mean you mentioned uh when you first found I I usually try and look a little bit into the background of the people I interview um I guess this is a little bit different because uh what I'm interviewing you about someone else in a sense but I couldn't fight anything about what you about your background it was very well very well hidden uh I only saw only there's one interview you did where you said you study literature how did you get how do how did you get to see the first image from kah um did you have an interest in the brain or like yeah I'm just I have no idea like how you how you got there my friend sent me a Wikipedia link to kahal to kajal's page and I couldn't believe I had never heard of him because he won the Nobel Prize and the drawing was so spectacular and I had studied literature and I think that that kahal loved literature he loved literature and I think his love of literature was a way for me to connect with him early on the way that literature influenc his life is the way that literature influences my life where it kind of seeps into your Consciousness and affects the way that you see yourself in the world and that's definitely true about kahal the way he read but yeah my friend had studied Neuroscience in college and he show he showed me this drawing and I was of and running yeah it's it's funny when you mentioned that you studyed literature I when was it I guess was like three or four months ago I took a train and you know uh you you have you have a connection so you you wait like an hour or something like that the train half an hour translation and I was in Cologne they have a very nice bookstore there I was just walking around and there was this book what's it called the best American short stories oh yeah and um by that point we had been scheduled to do do the interview and then suddenly I saw your name in there oh yeah um yeah I mean I have so many books that I didn't actually buy that one because I like I can't buy more books I'm just here to basically get rid of quarter of an hour but that was a pleasant surprise suddenly seeing seeing your name in a anthology of of short stories I'm assuming that's something you do a lot of that not just this one time or um not as much as my non-fiction Pro like my kahal project really consumed me for many years uh I write some fiction on the side and I was pleasantly surprised to be selected for that Anthology uh was very unexpected obviously but that's interesting that it was in a bookstore in Cologne I'll have to I like yeah they have a a fairly large I mean so this is it's not just a bookstop colone it's the bookstop in the train station I mean it's a big train station um and it's um and they yeah they have a section of English I guess it's just anthologies best American short stories you know I mean I picked it up I was like that's looks interesting just flick through the beginning and then yeah so uh it always seems so you know whenever someone produces something that I really enjoy it always feels mean relatively shortly afterwards to say what's next cuz it's like I just made this thing like what do you want U I'm curious what are you working on right now well I'm hoping to get another biography made of a different subject and I'm it's sort of I don't want to say I can't say who it is but because it's it's early on in the process but I'm working on another biography let's say okay can you I'll let you jce of a of a of a writer a writer okay okay um yeah I mean so as you know at the end of each interview ask this every person the same three questions yeah the first one is what is a book or paper you think more people should read read can be famous not famous old new uh just something you think what people should read I think people should read Italo calino Invisible Cities nice I put that into my Amazon card like a week ago I mean there's lots of books in my Amazon card but um yeah why why that one it's beautiful and uh it's I I just love it it's it's my favorite book okay well I guess that's as much of a of a as good a recommendation as you're going to get um it's actually it's kind of cool that you have a favorite book I feel like yeah I mean I think I think people always go well there's so many books and how can you that's exactly how I feel about it but when you're a kid when you're a kid you have favorite stuff you know it's like it's like your best friend you know that's my best friend like that's my favorite book you know I think it's I kind of have kept that a lot live throughout my life even though it's I'm a I'm I'm a little old to have favorite stuff but yeah that's interesting I I didn't think I really had that as a kid I was like you had to have a favorite C I was like what I don't know yeah I guess that's the difference between yeah uh second question um something you wish you'd learn sooner this can be from your work life from your private life I don't really mind just something that you think if You' learned that sooner your life might have been a little bit better and maybe how you learned it or what you did about it or yeah I would say learning impermanence to trust impermanence that everything passes good and bad just everything everything passes that that would have how do you learn that from experience okay just watching things go by yeah okay uh and final question question yeah so usually my final question is you know any advice to PhD students or posts um people with that kind of transition period um yes usually I interview academics who work at a universities so you can take this a bit more metaphorical if you want to people at a Crossroads people who finish something are going to start something you can change direction that kind of thing I would say trust your life just trust your life whatever happens trust your life in can you elaborate a little bit so in other words try your hardest but whatever happens accept the results because that's that's your life and you have to live you have to live the life that happens to you it is what it is yes okay well with that uh yeah thank you very much if it's if if we didn't make it clear I think people should read your book um so if people aren convinced yet hopefully my my little sentence here helped a little bit but uh yeah I think it's a really fascinating mography and yeah thanks for the time thank you man it's a pleasure

so we&#39;ll be talking about kahal now for the next hour hour and a half and everyone in my audience is going to know who kahal is to some extent because usually Neuroscience have some sort of first lecture where they say here&#39;s a neuron and it was drawn by Kahan that show one of his beautiful drawings and then you kind of move on 5 seconds later um so he&#39;s he&#39;s weirdly enough one of these figures that&#39;s at least to someone with my background very famous and also largely unknown and you wrote a fantastic biography of him and so I guess we&#39;ll be going through that uh today and I thought I&#39;d start by just reading kind of two short quotes uh from my biography to kind of set a little bit the scene about kind of K&#39;s contributions and also part of why he is interesting to talk about not only from a scientific but also from a personal perspective so first quote is by Hol Gren however you pronounced that who I think was part of the committee when he won the Nobel Prize and he said Kahala has not served science by singular Corrections of observations by others or by adding here and there an important observation to our stock of knowledge but it is he who has built almost the whole framework of our structure of thinking in which the less fortunately endowed forces have had to and will still have to put their contributions and then I think in the book just a few pages before uh before that you wrote when it came out that he won the Nobel Prize you wrote All who had known the Nobel Prize winner as a young delinquent responded with the same expression utter shock so um with that kind of as a as a little Preamble I think I&#39;ve rarely read a biography in which a single person other than the you know person being uh written about was so imposing as kah&#39;s father uh who seems to have been a real figure and I think you said he was uh he would have been the hero of the family if it hadn&#39;t been for Santiago Ral so maybe maybe I think we kind of almost have to start there with who is Cal&#39;s father just a little bit about him his background um maybe to the point where kahal was born sure all of this is taking place in the mountains of Northern Spain in communities that were about 90% illiterate that includes kah&#39;s father he stopped going to school at a young age in order to work in the fields for his family he was not the first born so he did not have an inheritance coming his way which she figured out and decided to move to a different village and Apprentice as a barber surgeon and barber surgeons at that time were a lowly medical class they were not educated formally and they would do procedures like pulling teeth and Lancing boils and things like that that were really not not appealing to other doctors but he was so driven that he taught himself to read went to medical school became a second class surgeon in and then moved back to his um ancestral home and uh ended up fathering kahal and uh his younger brother so he really set this example of ambition and drive and willfulness which were what accommodated Cal&#39;s education and upbringing but also created a lot of tension because kahal himself was also willful and uh determined and ambitious but his father&#39;s story of starting as an ill illiterate Shepherd&#39;s assistant to becoming uh he eventually got his PhD um much many years later so it&#39;s really an amazing story in and of itself yeah yeah I mean that&#39;s the it&#39;s it&#39;s yeah it&#39;s it&#39;s really fascinating how you have this like mini biography of someone who&#39;s who feels like is almost as interesting as a person trying to biography about than the person you actually can then write about I I I I particularly liked I think you said you can suiz him with a saying that is if you give an aranes man a nail to drive he would rather use his head than a hammer and that also seem to summarize him pretty well yeah uh yeah I mean I was for me it was also fascinating just the whole I mean I knew basically nothing about how medicine was practiced in the 19th century I guess I heard about blood letting and that kind of stuff but the idea of a barber surgeon and then these different classes of Surgeons uh let&#39;s just say I&#39;m glad that&#39;s not the way it is today anymore yeah I mean there were you know Dime dime horror novels where Barber surgeons were the villains you know that they were it was a really terrifying profession if you have to go to the barber surgeon you&#39;re really putting your life in in someone almost like a faith healer they were performing these cures that were very very rustic let&#39;s say so as you said then you know start with k himself um I mean his father&#39;s going to as we talk about Carl&#39;s childhood he&#39;s going to come back a few times um yeah and as you mention a lot of this takes place in very rural Northeastern Spain I think was it shington called him a peasant genius because he really grew up in like I mean now I looked at the Wikipedia article to what&#39;s it called ptia Aragon uh I mean I think now it&#39;s I think it used to be a bit more lively when he was around now it&#39;s like 50 people or something it&#39;s a ghost it&#39;s a ghost town no basically nobody lives there I went there and I didn&#39;t find a single person so yeah so what was it like when uh kahal grew up there I mean it was it just you know everyone had a you know a bit of land few animals maybe and people there that was it it was really hard to it was really tough soil because it was this like these like terrist plots on the side CU it&#39;s on it&#39;s on a it&#39;s on a Foothill of the Pyrenees so everyone would have like a little bit of land on the side of the hill and there were maybe about I don&#39;t know a few hundred people that live there and yeah the barber surgeon also gave haircuts and stuff like that you know so it&#39;s a real but but a but a key figure in the community yeah the combination is just it&#39;s just like well you&#39;ve got something to cut you might as well do both yeah exactly so what did kahal do as a as a young boy U what was he up to he he wandered around looking at nature every chance that he could when he was very young he hated school he had a visual like his genius was his visual memory but he couldn&#39;t remember words very well so I think that in today&#39;s schooling pedagogy we might call him that someone with a learning difference so because of his stubbornness combined with the learning difference he rebelled against all of his teachers and at a certain point started drawing and decided he wanted to be an artist which his father disapproved of to say the least so they sent him they sent him to a Jesuit school where he was beaten his father beat him also so there&#39;s a lot of trauma in his childhood from the treatment of of him by his Elders he basically never let go of his dream of being an artist he just applied it to Scientific objects rather than natural landscapes different natural landscapes let&#39;s say yeah well um I mean so this is also a theme that we&#39;ll probably come back to a few times in the conversation which is how I guess Spanish people viewed themselves at the time uh because it seems to me that it&#39;s it&#39;s not much of a coincidence that U or it kind of makes sense at least that kahal wanted to be a painter rather than a scientist um I I think you know as we&#39;ll come to as I said a little bit later it seemed like almost when he then decided to become a scientist part of what he wanted to do was to show that Spaniards can even be scientists so I&#39;m just curious kind of what was the just to kind of because it&#39;s so unlikely that kahal like someone like him would become one of the most famous scientists so just want to paint a little bit more kind of the picture of what he what kind of his mindset was growing up and kind of how he thought about maybe himself and what he could do um so could you tell you a little bit more about kind of like how people from Spain or particularly from his region kind of saw themselves and what they thought was possible yeah well Spain in general had not produced an internationally famous scientist and uh Aragon in in particular had never produced uh like when kahal was the chair of anatomy at the Central University in Madrid he was the first aragan to hold that position so Aragon was kind of like the sticks they they were considered to be Hicks according to the rest of the of urban Spain but his father Cal&#39;s father believed that it was possible for him to achieve to become a scientist so he actually started teaching him French as a young boy because he anticipated that kaha would need that on on the world stage as a scientist or well not as a scientist mostly he was anticipating kaha would become a famous doctor but if you think about the foresight of that from from a from the point of view of his father it&#39;s it&#39;s incredible it&#39;s it&#39;s such an Underdog Story on so many levels that kah was Spanish that he was from Aragon that he was from this Tiny Village that his father happened to be this guy who had such ambition and drive and will so despite his difficulty with formal schooling he did re he did receive this education by example from his father who also brutally punished him so I think psychically his father was a very complicated figure for for kahal yeah I mean you you said that he you know had has education by example but what I think was I mean also goes through his entire childhood and I mean even up to his PhD um is that kah&#39;s father really wanted I mean trained basically his own son and I I hadn&#39;t there was one paragraph again that I wrote out because I thought it was it&#39;s almost like a little it&#39;s almost like a short story in and of itself um then it cap capitulates a lot of this so like to read that too um she wrote in 1857 uh when K was five Spain passed its first comprehensive education reform requiring every child to enroll in school at the age of six H started educating Santiago by the way is it Santiago yeah that&#39;s his the childhood nickname santiag uh a year early hu&#39;s contract required him to treat patients as soon as he found out that they were sick and so he would lead Santiago away from the town where no one could find him in the dry scraggly Fields they discovered a small dark cave so small that hustle a stout broad shouldered man carrying an abacus and a globe would have bent down to step through narrowing opening there were no chairs only rocks and Santiago and his imposing father must have sat KNE to knee in the cramped space I mean I think there&#39;s so much that&#39;s great about this just one paragraph starting with the fact that his father would just like go somewhere so his patients couldn&#39;t find him yeah um but yeah can you tell say a little bit more about kind of this again as I said his father was so imposing and in one in in part of the sense was that he it seemed like throughout his early life if he just tried to teach him meds everything he knew about meds him and turn him into a doctor himself yeah he believed in kajal&#39;s intelligence which is part but he didn&#39;t understand his learning style until much later so because kahal couldn&#39;t remember Latin declensions and conjugations and but he could draw a map if he saw a map once he could draw it perfectly after that so there were all these uh specific strengths and weaknesses of kajal&#39;s intellect that his father knew better than anyone else and he cared his father for all of his flaws cared so deeply about education which was so rare in that climate in that mil and I think that he kahal could never get away from his father his father&#39;s influence and even his father&#39;s presence as they his father moved the family around to uh wherever kahal was was working as an adult so it was a complicated relationship and I think that there&#39;s no way kahal would have achieved his Heights without his father but it came at a CO it came at a real psychic cost obviously I mean his father died and kahal kahal doesn&#39;t doesn&#39;t mention his father&#39;s death in in his autobiography at all he doesn&#39;t say a single word about how he felt about it or you know so it&#39;s a little bit like conspicuous in its absence yeah yeah and uh I mean you mentioned he could get away from him if I remember correctly he also made kahal do his PhD in zagosa rather than in Madrid so he was close by yeah he made him study in zaragosa because he was worried about the return of his artistic uh Ambitions it was like art art was like the enemy to his father and it was only it was only when they worked together on an anatomical Atlas that his father understood the value of kajal&#39;s talent um because you know when he was younger he was just painting pictures of churches and uh women and um mountains and things like that but then once he found real objects for his drawings like you know when they started studying osteology and anatomy and histology that that&#39;s when it became apparent to his father that the talent was very useful yeah was this weird almost heartwarming moment I felt like when you felt like the father could suddenly like for the first time see some sort of worth in the thing that he tried to beat out of his childh all his life um but I don&#39;t know it&#39;s not exactly heartwarming either it&#39;s a yeah it it&#39;s so much of H&#39;s story is about trauma that he doesn&#39;t talk about U my first book was a translation of his dream diaries with which he tried to disprove Freud&#39;s theories but he quite obviously did not because there was so much unconscious that he was refusing to acknowledge and I think that that&#39;s true if you read his autobiography and you know his brother attests to how Savage the beatings of their F uh by their father were and again when he went to this Jesuit school they beat him and they locked him in freezing rooms without food and I mean this is there was a a saying in Spain at the time Ena which means knowledge comes with blood so it was not abnormal for kids to be abused but for for kahal to get at both that school and from his father whom he idolized I think was very I keep saying complicated but that&#39;s the best word yeah I mean as I said the complication I mean part of it is because it does feel like really you know he really then later with with science and Neuroscience in particular or histology that of the brain uh really found something that he you know was completely obsessed with and you know if I think I mean correct me if I&#39;m wrong but I think it&#39;s fair to say he wouldn&#39;t have done any signs if it hadn&#39;t been for his father absolutely he would he says in his autobiography that he would have ended up being like a second rate romantic painter that nobody would have remembered so yeah he owes he owes his father that um he for sure he owes his father that so moving on a little bit I it was still kind of one thing I found kind of slightly confusing almost was that it seemed like G never really had good grades but somehow he still managed to get into University and into do medicine and all that kind of stuff um was that just how did that work back was it just because his father was a doctor or like how did it seemed like this weird disconnect where somehow he then ended up up studing medicine even though who would basically let him in it was his father I remember one time in high school they wanted to expel him and there was a committee that was going to rule on it and his father had operated on the wife of one of the people on the committee so kahal got to stay in high school so his father was watching over him the whole time and as kahal was advancing in his education his father was accumulating more influence because of his own advancement it&#39;s like so yeah his father was basically watching over and kahal once he got to college his grades got better because you know descriptive Anatomy he really thrived in for example and he didn&#39;t care about any of the other subjects really than that but it was good enough to graduate I suppose yeah I mean so they maybe told me I mean so the the the thing that I find kind of interesting also was that uh I don&#39;t know exactly where it happens but in the in the in your book it takes about I don&#39;t know a third of it until maybe even more than the third maybe 40% or something until the brain like first basically enters his life because he you know didn&#39;t have anything to do with the brain until that point so maybe can you can you kind of take us through him studying medicine and kind of what he was the first kind of why he did science and not clinical practice and then kind of what the first um what is what his first kind of scientific Works were in sure he never wanted to practice medicine his father wanted him to practice medicine there were times in his life where his father actually did force him to take a post clinically different Villages and that didn&#39;t last very long kajal&#39;s fascination with the human body was aesthetic first and foremost he started his father started by studying osteology and kahal found that it was just a good subject for his pictures and then when he studied oology is bones righton stud bones and um once he started studying anatomy and especially microscopic Anatomy he found like a whole world of the invisible of the infinitely small as he put it and so what he was wanted to do is Elevate Spanish science by creating a textbook of histology the study of tissues because every book that he read was by a foreign author and he wanted Spaniards have somebody they could look up to so as he was going through and and Performing you know all these hystological studies of every part of the human body he came to the brain and he realized that there was no good picture of the brain so again it started with an image or the lack of an image and so he undertook to create so just briefly this would be in 1880 something like that yeah in the 1880s in the 1880s so you know not to mention that it was the most contested scientific Arena at the time because there was the reticular Theory which held that the brain was composed of a continuous fiber that was fused together and what kahal discovered is that the brain is composed of individual cells just like everywhere else else in the body for some reason cell theory was established in 1838 I believe but of all the living forms the the the brain was the only one that was thought to be composed of a different substance so so what kahal did is he kind of like completed the cell theory by discovering what waly are coined as neurons the basic unit of the nervous system and he did that through histology which again is dissecting tissue treating it with a fixative and staining it based on different uh chemical reactions that would leave a residue on the architecture of the cell that would show up on a microscope when you look through it so that was his practice but he he initially started doing it because of the lack of an image of the brain in a textbook that he wanted to put out yeah maybe why did why did they think the brain was diff was exempt from cell theory almost it wasn&#39;t that they theoretically I what I believe so first of all there was an an inadequacy and technique all the stains for cells were inadequate so for example there were some stains that only stain the cell bodies but then you know because there are nerve fibers that stem from from cell bodies in the brain in the nervous system you wouldn&#39;t be able to trace them because the stain would only take hold in the cell body there were other stains that stained everything but because the brain is so dense with fiber you would basically be looking at a blob of color and not be able to distinguish anything from anything else what kahal used was a technique called the GGI stain which was invented by someone else that he Cal perfected which R uh randomly they people still don&#39;t know why this is it random ly stands between 1 and 5% of cellular matter so it kind of like takes away the noise and you can just follow a single cell&#39;s fiber all the way to the end which is what kahal did he followed a fiber to see if it was connected to another fiber and because it ended freely he concluded that that meant that nerve cells were independent how just cous just at from like today&#39;s perspective like how good was I mean because from that he builds the whole neuron Doctrine and that neurons are separate from each other um how good was the evidence that he actually got at the time uh because especially in his early work I mean one thing we can also talk about a little bit is just how how poor the resources were that kah had available to him not only uh by today&#39;s standard but also at the time um but like how good was actually because I mean because in a way he&#39;s saying like there is no connection which and stating like the presence of an absence in a sense is in a way harder than you know it seems like the kind of finding where you could easily say well you just didn&#39;t quite there&#39;s something else that connects it or something like that well it wasn&#39;t conf it wasn&#39;t confirmed unequivocally until the 1930s with the electron microscope where they declared they they actually saw the Gap with an electron microscope and declared that kahal had been right at the time I think it was because people because of the cell theory because it made sense that there would be cells in the brain just like everywhere else and I think just the clarity and the power of His images you know he he won scientists over literally at a conference by calling them over to his table and having them look through his microscope and everybody was completely amazed because everyone had been trying to stain brain tissue in various ways they had given up on the Gogi stain it was like 15 years old at that point so people had given up on that and then Here Comes This Anonymous Spaniard with like his terrible friendch that he&#39;s his father taught him to speak in a cave when he was 5 years old and he&#39;s like come look at my samples come look at my samples and they blew everybody away maybe you can elaborate a little bit on this that basically first he he you know made these discoveries and was ignored like no one cared and it was fascinating to me that there was just this one moment basic basically in his life that seemed to well this this one moment that seemed to completely change his life um so could you maybe tell the story about yeah I can&#39;t remember what it&#39;s cool but it&#39;s one conference where ker uh went went up to him and basically then convinced everyone else to have a look yeah it was 1889 this International anatomical Congress in Berlin and kahal who never had a lot of money but always spent every extra Penny on supplies and his wife deserves a lot of credit a lot a lot of credit for her support and her sacrifice of some some Essentials in order for him to pursue his research so he basically spent all of his savings to take a third rate train not Third Rate train but in the third class he was traveling in third class holding a suitcase with his microscope and his slides and he shows up at the conference and they give him a table in the in the back corner cuz he&#39;s a nobody and people are streaming by looking at different presentations and he&#39;s trying to call out to them in French but his French is terrible again I just find it so funny and touching that it&#39;s like his father has was trying to prepare him for that moment it was like that&#39;s why his father taught him French in a cave he&#39;s like his father&#39;s like one day you&#39;re going to be at a conference and blah blah blah blah blah but finally he got ker who was like the the leading anat the person who was the most respected in the field at that time he got him to look through the microscope and he flipped out and he got everyone else to look through the microscope and what what they saw was a freely ending nerve fiber plain and simple and he had evidence from the retina from the cerebellum from the cortex and so he was proving this kind of like all across the nervous system in these different areas and a lot of these people that saw his slides converted to what became known as the neuron Doctrine where they all followed his lead and tried to prove the existence of neurons in every single part of the nervous system but it was a highly I I don&#39;t know what would have happened if he hadn&#39;t gotten caker to come over to his table world world history would have been different yeah part of me wondered that too because it&#39;s yeah basically what would have happened if not part of me thinks like he would have just might have a bit longer like he would have just like powered through but um yeah maybe a brief word about ker because he&#39;s someone who I mean I grew up in Germany I&#39;d never heard of and I mean maybe they mentioned him in school but I didn&#39;t really listen much so that was maybe on me but he&#39;s he&#39;s at least not a famous figure in Germany um his Wikipedia article was pretty short uh but as you said he was like one of the leading anatomists at the time uh so maybe who was he and and why did he even have a look at kahal slide if he was one of the most famous people at the entire conference he is someone who was trying to solve the same problem of the composition of brain matter and so I think that he had had an open enough mind to investigate a potential solution that nobody had attempted before so I think that&#39;s to his credit I think you know his textbook is one of the ones that didn&#39;t include a very good image of the brain that kahal had so I think he was a little bit skeptical of the reticular Theory and so again had an open enough mind to and became a champion of kahal like he said I have just he said to kahal I have discovered you and he brought him to the hotel at the dinner and he was parading him around and all of this and I don&#39;t I I don&#39;t know much about him beyond that either um but he played an important part in the story and if I remember correctly he even didn&#39;t he even like then end up learning Spanish so I mean this is one of the funniest things to me is that um it kind of shines through so I mean the one thing I did read about uh Baha was his invest what&#39;s it called histology of the nervous system of advice for young investigator oh yeah um you know I read that in my Masters or something like that and the one thing I found kind of funny from that is that he mentioned you had to learn like German and Italian and French and English if you wanted to follow the you know something that&#39;s very outdated today um but what I found really funny and almost endearing is that as you mentioned kahar almost spent most of his money on his signs and in particular he printed so maybe can he printed he he created his own journal or something like that and then printed off his own papers and then in Spanish sent them to people internationally who then obviously didn&#39;t read it because they didn&#39;t speak Spanish yeah but if I remember correctly K actually then ended up didn&#39;t he say like he learned Spanish so he could so he could translate it yeah translate even yeah yeah so like he really went beyond just uh as you said he really championed findings totally totally by the way just in aside one thing I found kind of funny is that you know you read about a world that seems so far away yet the lenses were made by T which is still one of the yeah most respected lens men makers today and he owned a Kodak camera which I think Kodak like really messed up like 20 years ago something like that but it was it was really random seeing like these two companies that are still very famous yeah it is appear this mography about some 13 years ago um I mean so we&#39;ve talked about about his discoveries and that kind of stuff I mean this was the initial Discovery basically right but then kind of he did much more in the let&#39;s say in the 1890s what was he trying to do yeah where where did his research take him he wanted to understand how the brain functions also by deducing from its structure so he came up with a theory he called Dynamic polarization which is basically that the signals received by dendrites transmitted through the cell body and then through axons to the next cell he didn&#39;t know about synapses at the time and he he doesn&#39;t write about synapses at all but he just deduced that by the way that cells were the neurons were arranged in various parts of the of the brain so he was concerned with function then he started studying the early like the embryonic stages of neur neuron development and he so so he discovered what are called growth cones and growth cones are these structures at the very tip of fibers that are trying to wind their way through the nervous system to make their final connection that was a huge Discovery that&#39;s still extremely fruit now these days and he studied the degeneration and regeneration of the nervous system especially the central nervous system in the brain he he did not believe that the brain could be regenerated but he he also left it open to future scientists to correct him and that&#39;s actually if anyone&#39;s listening who thinks that kahal shut the door on the possibility of regeneration in the brain he didn&#39;t he he said he said he couldn&#39;t find it but that someone else might be able to overturn him he also was the first person to use the term plasticity to refer to the central nervous system so he was he was interested in behaviors like learning and memory and how the how the structure of the brain would accommodate that and that was one of the main critiques his his main critiques of the reticular theory is that if the brain is composed of a single continuous uh fixed fiber how would learning and memory be reflected in that if there was no change yeah I mean we so we talked a little bit about kind of what his what his life was like in his childhood but now he&#39;s what&#39;s his life like now I mean it&#39;s one thing that&#39;s kind of surprised me but maybe that&#39;s just because it&#39;s in hindsight everything kind of sees OB obvious is that how much he kind of struggled to become a professor and he had these what are they called again the um opposition opposition yeah exactly how he those didn&#39;t necessarily work out in his favor uh but yeah can you kind of maybe talk a little bit kind of like how is the reception of him in Spain kind of changed basically throughout his scientific career well people in Spain still weren&#39;t aware of his discoveries in the 1880s and 1890s it really started when he won the Nobel Prize which was just such a huge deal because again he was the second Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize but the first one was in literature which again like as you alluded to before a much more traditionally Spanish Pursuit so so there it was kind of incredible and Spanish people were very proud that one of their own was being considered on the world stage in an arena that that people people were prejudiced against against Spaniards they didn&#39;t think that they could perform science because they were too hotheaded and passionate and what have you so kahal was proof that this that it was possible and so he became a famous person and very wealthy as well and uh he was living in Madrid he finally was able to achieve a Prof professorship at the Central University after years of failing in these oppositionists which are basically debates between candidates presentations rhetoric things that he wasn&#39;t very good at and they didn&#39;t even take into account very highly his uh foreign Publications or anything like that it was it was a very primitive way of determining who should what position but finally when he won the Nobel priz who was living in Madrid he bought a beautiful house next to rtio Park and uh a country house on the outskirts of Madrid but newspapers were obsessed with him there were profiles all the time people following him around his Nobel Prize win was chaos people were you know rushing after the train they were storming his balcony at all hours of the night it was it was really a huge deal yeah I was surprised that I mean I don&#39;t know the history of the Noel prize um uh in any detail but I was surprised at how because he won it in 1905 I believe or something that was six yeah but it was like four or five years after they started or something like that right so I I basically assumed that this was something like that The Prestige of the prize kind of grew over time and that like maybe you know it took a while but it seems that basically he you know very shortly after the was was was founded in that sense he won it and people just went nuts for it yeah they really did it&#39;s uh and he he was a very private person he didn&#39;t really care about Fame at all he just wanted to pursue his research that&#39;s all I mean he he I think it was nice for him to have some money finally for once but he was very modest and humble and very self-effacing he was a also an ego Maniac it should be said but um in public he really just wanted to be left alone yeah I mean I found um I found it funny what you said that he was also egomaniac because maybe not that surprisingly given what we talked about but he seemed like a very insecure person who really wanted a lot of recognition that kind of stuff he also seemed to really like also himself as it&#39;s you know at a time I guess when photography was so expensive you wouldn&#39;t expect someone to take that many self-portraits um but um that&#39;s a good point about the self-portraits though and I hadn&#39;t thought of the expense of Photography and how and how those self-portraits would would be would be costly yeah I mean if you know I I still remember that when I was a kid we had to you know you had like the the roles of the film you had to then go somewhere and they process it but like 100 years before that I don&#39;t know maybe he could do it or did he just do it himself maybe even but still he wasn&#39;t a rich man and took lots of photos of himself yeah yeah I mean I&#39;d like to talk a little bit kind of about a bit more directly maybe about what he was like as a person because one thing that&#39;s kind of fascinating to me is that I mean in some ways he seems like a great subject for biography but in some ways he also doesn&#39;t because it seems like he just wanted to work most of the time and be left alone and he he didn&#39;t seem I mean he it seems like he if I remember correctly he took part greatly in the kind of Cafe called of the time um but he didn&#39;t seem like someone I don&#39;t know when I read it I had the impression he probably wouldn&#39;t be that much fun to hang out with yeah yeah so I was just K yeah he he had a rich inner life and uh when I read his autobiography early on in my in my process of writing this book I could sense his self-presentation and how he was hoping to be seen and also I could fill in the blanks about what he was leaving out or at least I could sense that there were blanks and so as a subject he was very complex because you could never take him at his word and yet he was the only source for a lot of information and I think that one thing I want to say about him is that he was a good person you know like he wasn&#39;t one of these people who was a monster he never mistreated people who were of a lower class than him or people that worked for him everybody the opposite fil no yeah I mean he basically treated the working class better than yeah he could thumb he could thumb his nose at an at an aristocrat he the king once called for an audience with him and he blew him off for like 15 days but everybody who interact the waiters at the cafe his chauffeur all these people gave testimony you know about the way that he treated them he was very absent as a father because he was working so much but his kids remember him as as loving and he didn&#39;t perpetuate the cycle of violence that his father had begun so I enjoyed yeah I enjoyed not writing about a a person who was sort of secretly he did a lot for women in science I know that advice to a young investigator comes off as as a little bit sexist in today&#39;s age but the truth of the matter is he&#39;s he he had women scientists that he allowed to be le authors of papers at a time when that was completely unheard of so just a little just a little note about his character yeah yeah that&#39;s it&#39;s a fair point yeah yeah it&#39;s it&#39;s not that yeah you don&#39;t get the impression that he&#39;s a bad person but it&#39;s more that uh he just he seems very dry maybe that&#39;s it like if I let&#39;s say if I was going to do an interview with him I think he would be a lot of work on my part yeah it it would be for sure he he had a dry arogan sense of humor it&#39;s hard to pin down exactly what that means but people referred to a sense of humor as arogan it was dry and also tended towards the dark in terms of his humor he he wrote a ton I mean he wrote his scientific books he wrote short stories he wrote an autobiography um so he really and he really relished Solitude he was someone who preferred being alone to being with other people which I think is why your interview with him would be less interesting than if he were alone and you could listen to his thoughts somehow yeah it&#39;s one of those things where it&#39;s probably good that I&#39;m talking to the biographer rather than him directly maybe but I mean he he might I don&#39;t know who knows I mean because I mean one thing I also found interesting is that if I remember I think early on when he gave lectures remember correctly there was some people who said like I just like what&#39;s the point of going to the lectures I&#39;d rather read his books but then if I remember correctly like a few years later there were like his classes became very pop like before he like want an over priz anything like that his classes became very popular and there was this letter or I think that his students wrote to him that you included yeah where they just really I think they called him like a father figure to them and all that kind of stuff yeah yeah the the people who were truly interested in histology he was he was their hero but you know 95% of a intro to hystology class in medical school don&#39;t care about hystology so they were climbing climbing out of the windows to get away did he care about that I can&#39;t remember no he never care he never cared he would just draw a a spiral in his notebook that looked like a bacterium and that would mean that you were absent I see uh I feel like we have to talk at least briefly about Camilo GOI however you pronounce that uh just because it is I guess one of the more famous scientific fights is too strong um but but uh it&#39;s kind of quite amusing it&#39;s in particular what happened at the Noel priz lectures which is something I&#39;ve I&#39;ve not quite seen like that um can you maybe talk a little bit about kind of in general how they what the interaction was over the time you already mentioned that he used and maybe refined Go&#39;s method um yeah so GOI invented this stain in the kitchen of the mental hospital where he was working in I think 1870 3 and he knew that it was going to be revelatory but it was erratic like sometimes it would produce artifacts that looked like fibers but weren&#39;t fibers sometimes it would say it would stain none of the cells sometimes it too many of the cells so he came to the erroneous conclusion that there was a reticulum just like the prevailing Theory at the time but then he moved on to study pathology and by the time that he was awarded the Nobel Prize he really hadn&#39;t looked at the nervous system in about a decade so he got up to the microphone to give a speech and he basically behaved as though nothing had happened in the last 20 years of so just briefly for context I mean they both won the no priz together and they were giving back-to-back speeches or some or different days I can&#39;t remember I think it was different days and um but they were both jointly awarded the Nobel Prize even though the committee favored kahal they thought that it was important to recognize the inventor of the stand but kahal tried to meet GOI he tried to go to pavio where he taught and then he tried to meet him at before the ceremony but he actually went to the train platform to meet gogi&#39;s train but gogi&#39;s wife there was some excuse about gogi&#39;s wife had fallen in an ice skating accident and they had to rush her home because she wasn&#39;t feeling well or something like that so from at least kah&#39;s perspective he he tried to be cordial and I think that they were cordial and I think that it was shocking for most of the neuroscientists in the room to hear GOI so out of touch but he in his own right was a great scientist so it&#39;s unfortunate that he has this reputation as the loser of this intellectual battle when really it&#39;s just like one one mistake one glaring and persistent mistake that he that he made in not recognizing the existence of the neuron and maybe is I mean he didn&#39;t remember correctly he so GOI went first with his yeah he gave the first lecture which is kind of important um and then he kind of just I mean he didn&#39;t exactly attack kahal but it it felt like he didn&#39;t need to be as explicit about how much he thought kahal was wrong yeah he definitely attacked the neuron Doctrine and he he reassert Ed the reticular Theory which had been declared basically dead for like I said 20 years maybe I think around 1891 most neuroscientists and psychologists were had adopted the neuron Theory so this is like 15 years later and yeah it it was just an odd surprising experience and kahal says that he he sort of restrained himself and in his own speech the next day didn&#39;t attack back he he just kind of asserted the findings his own findings that supported the neuron Theory well you say he didn&#39;t attack back but uh kind of the last quote I think I wrote out was uh the the the final how kak ended his speech uh so he said uh we mourn the scientist who in the last years of a life so well filled suffered the Injustice of seeing a falling of young experimenters treat his most elegant and original discoveries as errors yeah you&#39;re right Prett yeah I forgot about that yeah that is definitely a a burn yeah it&#39;s quite verose but I think it gets the point across quite well um uh yeah I mean one thing I also found kind of quite fascinating was then the parallels between the two in particular what I found fascinating was then how K kind of did something similar that GOI did to him um kah did to Del Rio who I believe worked in his lab um and yeah can you maybe talk about what Del Rio found and kind of how K treated the discoveries yeah Del Rio was one of his students and uh there was a type of cell that kahal found that that he called the third element mysterious third elements and now the name of that cell is escaping me what&#39;s the other cell the other type of cell other than neurons in the brain uh G cells yeah so he was so what he was what he was discovering was gleo cells Del Rio was discovering G cells and he was studying to elaborate on different kinds of G cells and kahal refused to come come off of his own designation as like mysterious third elements he he still believed that you couldn&#39;t distinguish between them and it was a very complicated relationship kahal treated Del Rio quite Cru actually before later apologizing but Del Rio is considered the father of G cells so he was a great great disciple of kahal yeah and I mean anyone who I mean I I once took like a mini course on G cells and I think deio found the ol good dendrites and the microa so it&#39;s it&#39;s not just like he found the Gia house but like two particular types of them um so like major discoveries in a way I&#39;m surprised Delio isn&#39;t kind of more famous because of that but I I don&#39;t know I don&#39;t know but that&#39;s not a biography I&#39;m going to write so someone else lost to do yeah as a kind of final and maybe uh slightly uh sadder end to we you we mentioned his relationship with his father earlier um how did that end when his mother was sick his father started an affair with a 20 something year old girl when he was in the 70s in impregnated her and kahal was so enraged that he stopped speaking to him each of his other siblings eventually forgave his father but kahal never did so they died not not on speaking terms he died his father died not in speaking terms it&#39;s like for decades right or I don&#39;t oh no he was 70 I guess he didn&#39;t live that long but just towards towards the end yeah and that&#39;s yeah it&#39;s kind of a weird moment I feel like in the book when Suddenly It&#39;s just like oh damn that kind of I it&#39;s not like they had much contact before that right I mean it&#39;s at least I mean maybe his influence wasn&#39;t as immediate so maybe that&#39;s why he didn&#39;t mention it as much but uh kind of once gal becomes an independent scientist his father&#39;s not that much in the book anymore for yeah you don&#39;t hear anything about his father once he moves away from zaragosa which is where his father lives I think his father helped pay for something here here and there um I think that was way of controlling him of controlling Kahala was through the P strings but no they they weren&#39;t like working side by side on an anatomical Atlas like they were when they were both in zaragosa so his his his influence did wne yeah I mean I&#39;d like to you know kind of impar talk a little bit more about kind of what kahal was like and also uh what it was like for you writing a book about him you mentioned the difficulty in trusting Parts at at least or trusting lots of what Kar wrote in his autobiography um can you maybe talk a little bit about what I mean what&#39;s the a picaresque novel and uh why does that make it sometimes a little bit difficult to to trust everything K say about his own life the picaresque novel is a Spanish form that was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries I believe if not earlier where a sort of lower class Scamp survives by the skin of his teeth that&#39;s the expression and travels around getting into various trouble but ultimately surviving and moving on and kahal wanted to be like this like a like a romantic hero finding himself in these scrapes but getting out of it and he wrote his early part of of his autobiography to kind of mimic this this style where he&#39;s the incident in the orchard where he like steals fruit he blows down the Gate of one of his neighbors and gets away with it and so there is this stylization of his own and mythification of his own life based on the literature that he loved um I mean some of the ones where I think you mentioned earlier on that he everything from his childhood had to be kind of extreme like he made the best flutes the best slingshots or all that kind of stuff that that you know Shepherds wanted to buy and all that kind of stuff it&#39;s um but how kind of how do you deal with that as a biographer do you just look wherever you can you know for for third sources um and then kind of piece together what may or may not have been true or kind of because it&#39;s very difficult you know to I guess seems to me to write about someone who who died about 90 years ago or whatever and who liked who also wrote fiction yeah kind of how how do you figure out what&#39;s real and what isn&#39;t when data is a bit biased and maybe not that there&#39;s not that much data necessarily from different sources and it&#39;s not that reliable yeah you try you try when you can to find alternative sources and when you can&#39;t you just present the truth which is that he had a habit of presenting himself in a certain way for a certain reason and then you allow the reader to draw conclusions and at that point it almost doesn&#39;t matter if he really you know was thrown in jail for three days or five days or 15 days or not at all because what what we&#39;re understanding is not reality but his his view of reality so it matters less what actually happened as what he wished or willed to have happened in his own mind have to say your book has one of the more in more interesting ends to biography that I just just didn&#39;t expect because in the epilog you kind of talk a little bit about Rec themes and how um you can you maybe talk a little bit about how about the parallel between kahal um making drawings from composite images uh and kind of what you did as a biographer yeah kahal neurons never existed there are composits as you say of multiple observations of neurons that he synthesized into a singular image and so similarly my biography is presenting kahal as though he was a person who existed there was a person who existed in the in the same way that the multiply observed neurons existed but Mahal is a is a A reproduction of the various observations I made of him through my research so I I don&#39;t present a kahal as he existed I presented kahal as I studied and interpreted him from a composite of all these sources yeah um as a kind of very silly question but why write a biography about K I just fell in love yeah I just fell in love with this with him I just fell in love like many years ago and it just got stuck in my brain and I couldn&#39;t get over it I I thought it would make a great biography and I expected that someone else would write it and then after after about 5 years I realized no one was going to and I probably would have to do it myself and um it started with an image with the drawing one of his neuron drawings and I just needed to know the person behind that piece of art and then I read his autobiography and I saw that he was such a rich character and I just kept getting further and further down the rabbit hole until the book came out what did you think you needed that wasn&#39;t already in the autobiography of than maybe some sort of objectivity well yeah I I needed to understand the mind and the influences of a person who could create that piece of art because essentially his neuron drawings just like any artist it&#39;s an objective reproduction on one level but on the other level it is influenced by his life experience just like any other artist were so I wanted to know who he was and how that came to bear on his science and on his on his art yeah it&#39;s funny that you mentioned [Music] him the way you prr it now almost more as an artist than a scientist um because I there were um I think he had this quote that you quoted early on where he said only true artists are attracted to science and there was also description about the kind of students who in his lectures where he basically liked the people who did did Art and philosophy and all that kind of stuff and um those were the ones he really liked yeah I mean I just find it fascinating that he was kind of borderline forced into this line of research against his interests but then it ended up working out so perfectly because his actual interests then uh I guess they were complimentary to maybe what most people were taught and knew how and knew what to do you know the classic scientist who maybe wants to do medicine all time and reads in books and that kind of stuff is obviously going to look at the sales very differently than someone who maybe deep down actually wants to be a painter yeah yeah well that that&#39;s what I thought I thought that his neurons were in a way self-portraits I mean I don&#39;t want to go too far in in that you know obviously they they&#39;re not representative self-portraits but they are expressions they&#39;re self-expressions I believe um one of his disciples lorente Deno said that kaha would observe neurons in the morning then go for a walk in rtio park around noon and come back in the afternoon and draw them from memory so take that for what what you will but clearly there is a lot going on in between observation and reproduction there&#39;s a lot of interpretation going on and that&#39;s where the creative process is happening yeah and I think yeah I mean there&#39;s this to me also this really interesting kind of seeming conflict maybe at least um between supposedly objective truth and Science and this kind of personal subjectivity that the scientist brings into it that I think that whole topic kind of even though it&#39;s not usually expressed that explicitly in in y biography it&#39;s kind of still like a backdrop almost to to much of what&#39;s going on there yeah absolutely I mean it started with his father&#39;s iation of science and art art being a delinquent Pursuit and science being the Holy Grail basically I think that Cal&#39;s quote only true artists are attracted to science is like a middle finger to his father I think more than anything else but yeah there&#39;s it was so physical you know like he was handling the dissection and the stain and the ink and the um chemicals and all of that and it just it felt to me like so alive the process is so alive and it&#39;s not it&#39;s not something that a machine did it&#39;s something that a person did and his drawings are not like any other anybody else&#39;s drawings everybody has their own style you look at the other histologists from around this time all of them made beautiful work they all have different styles so I&#39;m not CLA climing that I&#39;m claiming that this is the perfect Confluence of science and art the fact that he made artistic drawings that are in neuroanatomy textbooks to this day is a testament to How Art and Science can coexist and and be mutually supportive yeah it&#39;s yeah it&#39;s basically he just made the perfect drawings even if we can have you have some that are more accurate it&#39;s like I mean for some purpose obviously you need the more accurate ones but for any kind of introduction to Neuroscience is like I mean what more do you want exactly but I&#39;m just curious I mean you mentioned uh when you first found I I usually try and look a little bit into the background of the people I interview um I guess this is a little bit different because uh what I&#39;m interviewing you about someone else in a sense but I couldn&#39;t fight anything about what you about your background it was very well very well hidden uh I only saw only there&#39;s one interview you did where you said you study literature how did you get how do how did you get to see the first image from kah um did you have an interest in the brain or like yeah I&#39;m just I have no idea like how you how you got there my friend sent me a Wikipedia link to kahal to kajal&#39;s page and I couldn&#39;t believe I had never heard of him because he won the Nobel Prize and the drawing was so spectacular and I had studied literature and I think that that kahal loved literature he loved literature and I think his love of literature was a way for me to connect with him early on the way that literature influenc his life is the way that literature influences my life where it kind of seeps into your Consciousness and affects the way that you see yourself in the world and that&#39;s definitely true about kahal the way he read but yeah my friend had studied Neuroscience in college and he show he showed me this drawing and I was of and running yeah it&#39;s it&#39;s funny when you mentioned that you studyed literature I when was it I guess was like three or four months ago I took a train and you know uh you you have you have a connection so you you wait like an hour or something like that the train half an hour translation and I was in Cologne they have a very nice bookstore there I was just walking around and there was this book what&#39;s it called the best American short stories oh yeah and um by that point we had been scheduled to do do the interview and then suddenly I saw your name in there oh yeah um yeah I mean I have so many books that I didn&#39;t actually buy that one because I like I can&#39;t buy more books I&#39;m just here to basically get rid of quarter of an hour but that was a pleasant surprise suddenly seeing seeing your name in a anthology of of short stories I&#39;m assuming that&#39;s something you do a lot of that not just this one time or um not as much as my non-fiction Pro like my kahal project really consumed me for many years uh I write some fiction on the side and I was pleasantly surprised to be selected for that Anthology uh was very unexpected obviously but that&#39;s interesting that it was in a bookstore in Cologne I&#39;ll have to I like yeah they have a a fairly large I mean so this is it&#39;s not just a bookstop colone it&#39;s the bookstop in the train station I mean it&#39;s a big train station um and it&#39;s um and they yeah they have a section of English I guess it&#39;s just anthologies best American short stories you know I mean I picked it up I was like that&#39;s looks interesting just flick through the beginning and then yeah so uh it always seems so you know whenever someone produces something that I really enjoy it always feels mean relatively shortly afterwards to say what&#39;s next cuz it&#39;s like I just made this thing like what do you want U I&#39;m curious what are you working on right now well I&#39;m hoping to get another biography made of a different subject and I&#39;m it&#39;s sort of I don&#39;t want to say I can&#39;t say who it is but because it&#39;s it&#39;s early on in the process but I&#39;m working on another biography let&#39;s say okay can you I&#39;ll let you jce of a of a of a writer a writer okay okay um yeah I mean so as you know at the end of each interview ask this every person the same three questions yeah the first one is what is a book or paper you think more people should read read can be famous not famous old new uh just something you think what people should read I think people should read Italo calino Invisible Cities nice I put that into my Amazon card like a week ago I mean there&#39;s lots of books in my Amazon card but um yeah why why that one it&#39;s beautiful and uh it&#39;s I I just love it it&#39;s it&#39;s my favorite book okay well I guess that&#39;s as much of a of a as good a recommendation as you&#39;re going to get um it&#39;s actually it&#39;s kind of cool that you have a favorite book I feel like yeah I mean I think I think people always go well there&#39;s so many books and how can you that&#39;s exactly how I feel about it but when you&#39;re a kid when you&#39;re a kid you have favorite stuff you know it&#39;s like it&#39;s like your best friend you know that&#39;s my best friend like that&#39;s my favorite book you know I think it&#39;s I kind of have kept that a lot live throughout my life even though it&#39;s I&#39;m a I&#39;m I&#39;m a little old to have favorite stuff but yeah that&#39;s interesting I I didn&#39;t think I really had that as a kid I was like you had to have a favorite C I was like what I don&#39;t know yeah I guess that&#39;s the difference between yeah uh second question um something you wish you&#39;d learn sooner this can be from your work life from your private life I don&#39;t really mind just something that you think if You&#39; learned that sooner your life might have been a little bit better and maybe how you learned it or what you did about it or yeah I would say learning impermanence to trust impermanence that everything passes good and bad just everything everything passes that that would have how do you learn that from experience okay just watching things go by yeah okay uh and final question question yeah so usually my final question is you know any advice to PhD students or posts um people with that kind of transition period um yes usually I interview academics who work at a universities so you can take this a bit more metaphorical if you want to people at a Crossroads people who finish something are going to start something you can change direction that kind of thing I would say trust your life just trust your life whatever happens trust your life in can you elaborate a little bit so in other words try your hardest but whatever happens accept the results because that&#39;s that&#39;s your life and you have to live you have to live the life that happens to you it is what it is yes okay well with that uh yeah thank you very much if it&#39;s if if we didn&#39;t make it clear I think people should read your book um so if people aren convinced yet hopefully my my little sentence here helped a little bit but uh yeah I think it&#39;s a really fascinating mography and yeah thanks for the time thank you man it&#39;s a pleasure

Transcript for:Lecture on Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Transcript for:
Lecture on Santiago Ramón y Cajal