Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain

by Dennis Cass

Overview

“Dennis Cass ventures into the terra infirma that is neuroscience, and returns with a fascinating, funny and touching tale. I recommend it for anyone who owns a brain.” — AJ Jacobs, New York Times Bestselling author of The Know it All

In the tradition of Supersize Me, Dennis Cass becomes a human guinea pig in a darkly comic journey to understand the human brain and find out what makes us who we are

Infiltrating the world of neuroscience, Cass offers his own brain up to science, subjecting his mind and body to electric shocks, mind-numbing attention tests, stress tests of his own devising and cigarettes. In the spirit of George Plimpton and early Tom Wolfe, his exploits reveal the intricacies of fear, attention, stress, reward and consciousness from the inside out. Along the way, he weaves in the story of stepfather’s manic depression and drug addiction, as well as his own troubles with stress and depression, giving neuroscience a personal touch along with the clinical facts.

Cass attacks the subject of the human brain with wit and candor, turning popular science into something distinctly human. Head Case is an imperative read for anyone who’s ever asked themselves why they are who they are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060594732
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/11/2008
Series:	P.S. Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 10.88(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Dennis Cass has been a journalist for ten years, writing for Harper's, Spin, Mother Jones, and Slate.com. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and son.

Read an Excerpt

Head Case

How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain

Chapter One

False Insight

I am not a scientist. When I was a boy, I went on field trips to the Seattle Science Center and watched the occasional nature show. I might have even enjoyed a book about dinosaurs. But by the age of twelve, whatever affinity I had for the scientific arts had turned into disinterest mixed with fear. Even though I went to a math-and-science high school, I hid in the English department, while in college I barely survived gut-level astronomy. Then science disappeared from my life for over a decade. Today the "latest findings" means an e-mail from a friend about the discovery of a 900-pound prehistoric guinea pig. Otherwise the sciences bring news that I would rather not hear—stories about deadly rays and faltering ecosystems and genetic betrayal. If science can't provide an easy laugh, then I do my best to avoid it.

If I weren't such a stranger to science, I doubt my idea to learn about my brain would have affected me so profoundly. It was the summer of 2002 and I was at my desk in my home office in Minneapolis, suffering from the worst case of writer's block I had ever experienced. All the office toys and charms that were intended to inspire—the picture my wife, Liz, took of my nakedfeet; my Greek good-luck eye; my Playmobil dragon—instead mocked me with their empty whimsy. My mental frustration was so powerful it manifested itself physically. I had a headache. My vision was blurry. My jaw hurt. Instead of writing, I passed the morning torturing myself with an internal monologue of self-rebuke. I am truly astounded at how much you suck.

Then my brain suddenly offered a simple, clear thought, a question that I heard in my head as clearly as if I had said it out loud:

How can you expect to live by your wits if you have no idea how your wits work?

This thought was accompanied by a positive emotional charge of a magnitude that I hadn't felt before, and haven't felt since. It was as if some kind of orgasmic yes juice were surging through every cell in my body. Centuries ago, the Greek mathematician Archimedes was taking a bath when he suddenly realized he could use water displacement to measure the volume and density of a solid object. He was so moved by his insight that he jumped out of the tub and ran naked down some ancient Greek street shouting, "Eureka!" I have found it! I knew exactly how he felt. After my insight I immediately left my office, went to the corner store, and bought an ice cream sandwich. For the next two days I was so pleased with myself that I did absolutely nothing.

Eventually this question about how my wits worked led me to the science of the human brain. At first my approach was casual. I started poking around the Internet, and what I found astounded me. While I had spent the nineties being angry at bands for selling out, neuroscientists seemed to have been making startling advances in our understanding of how the brain worked. I read about how brain scans might be able to detect potential terrorists, and about research into a neural prosthesis for storing memories, and efforts to make a monkey move a robot arm with his thoughts. Unbeknownst to me, I had been living in the middle of a cognitive revolution.

Once brain science was on my personal radar, it seemed like the entire world was taking part in a Mardi Gras of the human brain. There were brain-centric movies such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Matrix and Memento. Schoolkids by the thousands were taking part in Brain Awareness Week and writing poems with titles such as "Oh, My Sweet Hippocampus." I started seeing references to brain structures in places as disparate as The New Yorker and the supermarket tabloid First for Women. While shopping for hot sauce, I stumbled across a brand that featured a brain scan on the back label. That settled it. When condiments start offering signs and portents, I listen. The insight became a plan for living: I decided I would learn everything I possibly could about my brain.

But was this a good idea? Was the aha! moment a good indicator of a quality thought? Anecdotally it seemed that way. We owe the discovery of the ring structure of the chemical benzene, a prototype of the theory of evolution, and the theme of a symphony to insight. The fact that I had my insight in an office chair didn't discount its potential. The aforementioned insights could be credited, respectively, to sleeping, fighting a fever, and unwrapping a piece of cheese.

The science of insight, however, told a more cautious story. Insight sounds glamorous, ripe for a self-help book on how to think like a genius, but insight is only one of the cognitive tools the brain uses to conduct its daily business. "In real life, because you have an insight, it doesn't mean it's right," Mark Jung-Beeman, an insight researcher at Northwestern University's Brain Mapping Group, later told me. "You still have to go back and check your work."

If I had thought more critically about my insight, if I had kept a cooler, more scientific head, I might have answered my question the day I posed it to myself. The answer to "How can you live by your wits if you don't know how your wits work?" is this: It's easy. People do it every day. In the same way you don't need to know how a computer works to send an e-mail, or how an internal-combustion engine works to ride the bus, you don't need to know anything about the mechanics of your brain to live your life. The enthusiasm that can accompany a thought is meaningless: ideas are only as good as the outcomes they produce.

I knew this. I had seen what could happen when enthusiasm ran amok. I not only knew it, I had lived it.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Head Case by Dennis Cass Copyright © 2007 by Dennis Cass. Excerpted by permission.
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Editorial Reviews

Dennis Cass ventures into the terra infirma that is neuroscience, and returns with a fascinating, funny and touching tale. I recommend it for anyone who owns a brain.” — New York

“Armchair quarterbacks had George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, wannabe bikers had Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, and now anyone curious about their own brain has Dennis Cass’ Head Case, a compulsively readable and witty account of his quest to understand what makes him—and us—tick. Neuroscience has never been examined in quite this way, and it’s certainly never been so funny.” — Adelaide Advertiser

“[A] fast-reading story with educational tidbits snuck in....Mr. Cass relates his ideas in a breezy, conversational style...a fun and informative read.” — Washington Times

From the Publisher

Armchair quarterbacks had George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, wannabe bikers had Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, and now anyone curious about their own brain has Dennis Cass’ Head Case, a compulsively readable and witty account of his quest to understand what makes him—and us—tick. Neuroscience has never been examined in quite this way, and it’s certainly never been so funny.

Adelaide Advertiser

[A] fast-reading story with educational tidbits snuck in....Mr. Cass relates his ideas in a breezy, conversational style...a fun and informative read.

Washington Times

Dennis Cass ventures into the terra infirma that is neuroscience, and returns with a fascinating, funny and touching tale. I recommend it for anyone who owns a brain.

New York

For author Dennis Cass, the project (and thus the book) began with an epiphany. Mired in a writer's block, he suddenly confronted himself with a question: How can you expect to live by your wits if you don't know how your wits work? This back-to-basics challenge inspired him to begin an ambitious series of experiments on how the brain works. Serving as a human guinea pig, he subjected himself to electric shocks, mind-twisting attention drills, stress tests, and other self-devised trials. Eventually, his improvised crash course in neuroscience degenerated into dangerous dabbling with prescription drugs and a rigorous self-examination. The author has asserted that this is the first book to fully humanize the intersection between thought and life. We're not certain about that, but we can say that Head Case will change the way you think about your brain.

When writer's block threatened to interfere with Cass's career as a freelance journalist, he decided the solution would be to learn everything he could about how the brain works. He soon fancies himself an amateur scientist, embarking on a spree of experimentation, self-diagnosing himself with attention deficit disorder and scoring a prescription to Adderall, which helps at first but then starts messing up his mind. As Cass makes clear from the outset, the journalistic enterprise is fraught with emotional turbulence because it forces him to confront his family history, especially his stepfather's manic depression. Yet for all the outward appearances of candor-Cass, a former columnist for GQ and Slate, speaks freely of humiliating childhood experiences as well as of his adult jealousy of more successful writers like Malcolm Gladwell-it still feels like he's holding back. The science elements of the book are also insufficiently developed, especially when writers like Steven Johnson and Daniel Pink have already effectively staked out the genre of first-person guided tours of neuroscience. At times, Cass comes off as genuinely uncomfortable with what his research tells him about his brain and himself, leaving readers wishing he'd pushed harder to get a richer story. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A brainstorm that brings regrets yields a different sort of popular book on the state of neuroscience. Grappling with a bad bout of writer's block, freelancer Cass suddenly asked himself: How can you expect to live by your wits if you have no idea how your wits work? He would explore the inner workings of the brain, he decided, entering into communion with the organ. So, notebook at the ready, Cass visited state-fair exhibits and serious labs. He interviewed various doctors, researchers, behaviorists, cognition experts and one transcendental-meditation guru. He checked out legions of lab rats enlisted in the cause of brain science. He started a "brain log" and considered how Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Maher affected his mind. He got himself tested for ADD. He studied-and reports assiduously on-evolutionary psychology, the galvanic skin response to nicotine and, inevitably, alcoholic cognitive impairment. He contemplated the cracks and fissures of the brain, the cortex, nuclei, gyri and suki, neurotransmitters, the hippocampus and dopamine receptors. With flimsy protocols, he conducted amateur experiments at home, in the Mall of America and at an Arby's fast-food restaurant. But there was a dark history interlaced with the sometimes antic behavior. The author blends his excursions into the science of attention and emotion with the harrowing tale of his stepfather, a seriously crazy man: arrogant, addicted and out of control. The birth of Cass's first child makes for happier tales, but on balance, his text brings stark news. For all its wonders, through the mysterious amygdala so carefully described, the human brain is also responsible for stupidity, aggression and the sport of competitiveeating. Despite the intelligence and easy wit of Cass's prose, it is all somehow a bit dismal, and he ultimately expresses regret for the effort that produced his earnest, honest testimony. Science for liberal-arts students. Agent: Heather Schroder/ICM

Kirkus Reviews