Kean makes excellent use of dozens of bizarre historical vignettes and reveals their profound neurological significance, from unlucky Civil War veteran George Dedlow – who had all four limbs amputated – to Phineas Gage – who accidentally blasted a 3 ½ feet steel spike completely through his brain without losing consciousness and lived to tell about it on the national lecture circuit. Kean uses this tragedy and many others – from presidential assassinations to tropical prion epidemics – to explore some fascinating aspects of the human brain. Although the men were unable to help poor Henri, their findings did much to advance the understanding of traumatic brain injury. The unfortunate monarch was examined by Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius, two of the greatest medical minds of the time. The book’s title is drawn from the unhappy story of King Henri II of France who sustained an eventually fatal brain injury due to an errant lance tip at a jousting tournament in 1559. If pondering such neurologic minutiae stimulates your pleasure centers, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, the latest by bestselling science writer Sam Kean is sure to be right up your axon. That’s why it’s so hard to fake an honest smile of happiness and so easy to detect a phony one. A genuine smile calls on the coordination of particular brain centers, while smiles that are generated by other emotions don’t use the same neurologic pathways, resulting in subtle differences. But no matter why someone is smiling, people are particularly good at deciphering the truth behind a smile. He weaves these narratives together with prose that makes the pages fly by, to create a story of discovery that reaches back to the 1500s and the high-profile jousting accident that inspired this book's title.A smile can reveal so many things: pure joy, utter malevolence or complete indifference. In The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean travels through time with stories of neurological curiosities: phantom limbs, Siamese twin brains, viruses that eat patients' memories, blind people who see through their tongues. Some people couldn't speak but could still sing. Pillars of the community became pathological liars.

Parents suddenly couldn't recognize their own children. Observers were amazed by the transformations that took place when different parts of the brain were destroyed, altering victims' personalities. In many cases their survival was miraculous, if puzzling.

Early studies of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike - strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, horrendous accidents - and see how victims coped.

The tale of two dueling neurosurgeons