What are the common qualities of these scientific masters?

The growth processes of the masters are different and difficult to compare, but they do have some things in common.

Written by Gu Fanji (School of Life Sciences, Fudan University)

After I retired in 2004, I read a lot of biographies and memoirs of brain science masters for my popular science writing. Comparing the success of the masters and reflecting on my own mediocrity in scientific research, I couldn't help but want to explore their paths to success. Although it is too late for me, if I can tell my insights to the younger generation - although my insights may not be correct - at least it can arouse their thinking and let them find the appropriate path to success in practice according to their specific circumstances. This may be a very meaningful thing.

3i Quality

At the beginning, I wanted to find the common points in the paths to success and the ways of doing research of these masters, so that later generations could emulate them. After carefully reviewing the deeds of 29 masters who made significant contributions at key points in the history of brain science, I found that they did have common points in the four aspects of their ways of doing research: "ambition, learning, thinking, and questioning." This can be summarized by the motto of my alma mater, Fudan University: "Broad learning and firm determination, earnest questioning and close thinking." Of course, this ancient motto needs to be reinterpreted in line with the times. For details, please see my article "10 Ways of Doing Research by Brain Science Masters丨Unfolding the Scroll" published in "Fanpu". [1]

However, there is no common pattern in the success of these masters. This is because each of them has different talents, opportunities, families and social environments. Their growth process can be described as various. There are not only prodigies and academic masters, but also literary youths, girls next door and even problem teenagers. In terms of their origins, there are medical families, and there are also poor immigrant families whose parents are artists and even cannot find any books in the house. There are those who published papers in Nature magazine while they were students, which can be said to be shining stars before they leave the school, and there are also late bloomers who started postgraduate studies in their thirties. Academician Zhang Xiangtong, the founder of brain science in my country, did not enter the first grade of elementary school until he was 14 years old due to his poor family. If he really believed the popular saying "Don't let your children lose at the starting line", then Mr. Zhang would have no hope at all. Therefore, it is impossible to find a universal success model that can be replicated.

So I had no choice but to give up. But this question has been lingering in my mind. Fortunately, after writing the book Discovering the Brain: Who Started the Journey of Mind? [2], I was already very familiar with the growth process of these masters. Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration and thought that although their experiences were different, they did have some common qualities. In summary, they are mainly "curiosity", "questioning" and "perseverance". The last letter of the Chinese pinyin of these three words happens to be i, so I call it "3i quality". Thinking about it again, not only the masters of brain science, but also the masters of other disciplines, and even outstanding people in all walks of life may have these 3i qualities. So if you want your children not to lose at the starting line, it is not to take this or that class as early as possible and fill their heads with all kinds of knowledge, but to cultivate 3i qualities from an early age. To this end, parents and teachers should set an example and cultivate their children's 3i qualities through their own 3i qualities.

If a child prodigy or a top student has 3i qualities, we will not be surprised. However, a "problem teenager" who becomes a great man may actually have some "naughty" behaviors that show 3i qualities, but his parents neither discovered it nor guided him properly. This is thought-provoking. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the world-recognized "father of neuroscience", was such a problem teenager when he was young. He was even very naughty, which gave his parents and teachers a lot of headaches.

In 1852, Cajal was born into a doctor's family in a small town on the Spanish border. He was not a well-behaved child since he was young. He had a strong personality and was crazy about things he liked, but it was difficult to force him to dislike things. For example, he liked to observe the behavior of birds. Once he did not return home all night, so many people searched for him all night. It was not until the morning that they found that he was trapped next to a bird's nest halfway up the cliff. He could not go up or down, so he could only wait for dawn there. In school, Cajal's grades were very poor, and he was beaten for skipping school. In 1863, when Cajal was only eleven years old, he was imprisoned for a few days because he used a homemade cannon to blow down the gate of his neighbor's yard.

Another hobby of Cajal was sketching. As long as he was given a piece of paper, his hands would itch and he would always want to draw something: a mule raising its hoof, a hen hatching eggs, a castle on a high place, etc. However, his father not only did not take advantage of his painting talent and cultivate it (Cajal's outstanding artistic talent played a great role in his future success), but instead strongly opposed it - he was worried that his son would neglect his studies if he continued like this.

His father sent him to a seminary that he hated, which naturally did not lead to any good results. In desperation, his father made him an apprentice to a barber. The barber made him work while he amused himself. He was very dissatisfied with this and became the leader of a group of hooligans. Parents did not allow their children to be with him, and he was very depressed. At this time, a kind-hearted shoemaker was willing to take him as an apprentice, which made him feel better. After a while, his father allowed him to enroll again. This time he performed well, but an accident still happened: in the moonlight, a newly whitewashed wall was too tempting for him, and he drew many cartoons of teachers on the wall with a burnt stick, which of course made these teachers very angry.

In the summer of 1868, his father took him to a cemetery to look for human remains for anatomical research, hoping to arouse his interest in medicine and follow in his father's footsteps. Unexpectedly, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as Cajal's natural love for painting was triggered and he became fascinated with depicting skeletons. This became a turning point in his life and he embarked on the path of medical research.

If you had a son like Kajal, how would you view him? Could you see his curiosity and persistence in his favorite things from his "naughty" behavior? Could you guide him correctly?

curious

British biologist William Beveridge once said, “Perhaps, the two most basic qualities for a researcher are a love of science and an insatiable curiosity.”[3] Marie Curie also said, “Curiosity is the first virtue of a scholar.” Tsung-Dao Lee said, “We must cultivate students’ curiosity and encourage them to dare to ask questions.” These are all based on their experience. Because of their strong curiosity, scientists will not be afraid of dangers and obstacles to get to the bottom of things, “waste their lives for it,” and ultimately achieve success.

Brenda Milner, a pioneer of modern memory research, once said: "I also benefited from my curiosity. It is curiosity that makes me always want to delve into the depths of the surface phenomena that attract my attention, and this is still the case today." "By nature, I am a good observer. I will find something strange in a patient and think: 'This is very interesting. Why is the patient like this?' Then I will try to find out the reason and test it with scientific methods." When answering a reporter's question "What qualities do you require of your graduate students?", she replied: "They must have a strong curiosity." The founder of modern memory research, Nobel Prize winner Kandel, claimed: "I get great pleasure from thinking about how memory works, proposing specific ideas on how to maintain memory, and improving these ideas through discussions with students and colleagues, and then observing how to correct these ideas through experiments. I am constantly exploring science, and in doing so I am almost like a child, always with pure fun, curiosity and surprise." [Note 1]

Unlike Kahar, Indian-American neuroscientist VS Ramachandran was a child prodigy, curious about chemistry and biology. "What drove me was curiosity and the constant questioning of 'what if?'" he later recalled. "I remember when I was twelve years old reading about the axolotl, which is essentially a salamander, but evolution has kept it in its aquatic larval stage. By stopping metamorphosis and maturing sexually in water, it has retained its gills (rather than lungs like salamanders or frogs). I was stunned to read that by giving it metamorphosis hormone (thyroid extract), it could be transformed back to the long-extinct, terrestrial ancestor from which it evolved, without gills. You could turn back time and resurrect a long-extinct prehistoric animal that you can't find anywhere else on Earth. I also knew that For some unknown reason, adult salamanders cannot regenerate legs after losing them, but tadpoles can. My curiosity led me to ask the following question: Could axolotls (which are actually a kind of "mature tadpole") retain the ability to regenerate lost legs after losing them, just as frog tadpoles do today? What other creatures on Earth are like axolotls? These animals can be restored to their ancestral form by simply giving them hormones. If we use the right mixture of hormones, could we also restore humans to their ancestral form, perhaps a bit like Homo erectus? After all, humans evolved from apes and retained some of their early characteristics. A lot of questions and speculations came to my mind, and from then on, I was fascinated by biology forever. "[4] Look! A simple report about axolotls aroused so many associations and questions in Ramachandran!

It was this curiosity and rich imagination that enabled Ramachandran to make remarkable achievements in neurology. One of his most famous works was to uncover the mystery of "phantom limbs". Phantom limbs are when patients can still feel the limbs they have lost after surgery or an accident.

Ramachandran was deeply attracted to this kind of patient from the first time he saw it. He felt like Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle's novel, who had to solve this puzzling mystery based on the clues he collected and scientific reasoning. He remembered the work of Wilder Penfield, a famous Canadian neurosurgeon many years ago. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Penfield was treating patients with epilepsy who had no medical treatment, he had to open the patient's skull to find the epileptic focus and remove it. To do this, he had to be very careful to find out in advance whether the part he was going to remove had a very important function and whether removing it would cause serious sequelae. Therefore, he had to use electrodes to detect various parts of the brain before the operation. Because the patient remained awake during the operation, Penfield could ask the patient how he felt when he used electrodes to stimulate different parts of the patient's cerebral cortex. He found that stimulating a long brain area along the back of the central sulcus could cause the patient to feel as if different parts of his body were stimulated, from the top of the brain down to the genitals, legs, buttocks, etc. If these parts were drawn next to each other, it would look like an inverted little man (Figure 1).

Fig. 1 Representation areas of various body parts in the somatosensory cortex.

This observation of Penfield was also confirmed by subsequent animal experiments. When different parts of the monkey's body are stimulated, nerve impulses can be recorded in similar brain areas. Therefore, each part of the body surface has a representative area at the posterior edge of the central sulcus of the opposite cerebral hemisphere. Later, animal experiments showed that this representation area of ​​the body surface in the brain is not static. All sensory fibers from one of the monkey's arms to the spinal cord were cut off, and 11 years later, the representation area of ​​this arm in the somatosensory cortex of the brain could be recorded again. When this arm was stimulated, the nerve cells in the sensory representation area corresponding to this arm in the normal monkey brain did not respond - this is easy to understand, but what is surprising is that when the monkey's face is touched, the cells in the brain area corresponding to this arm that has long lost its sensation violently emit electrical signals. This means that the tactile information from the face not only reaches the brain area that originally corresponds to the touch of the face, but also "invades" the brain area that originally corresponds to the arm. When Ramachandran read the relevant information in 1991, he was surprised and surprised. He thought, "Oh my goodness! Maybe this can explain the phantom limb phenomenon!" He wanted to know what it felt like when he touched the monkey's face. Did it also feel the touch on its long-paralyzed arm? Or did it only feel the touch on its face? Unfortunately, monkeys can't speak.

Ramachandran suddenly thought that although monkeys cannot speak, people can. If you touch the face of a phantom limb patient, will the patient also feel that his phantom limb is being touched? He found Tom, a patient who had just lost his arm.

When Tom sat down in the lab, Ramachandran covered his eyes with a blindfold so that he could not see or hear what Ramachandran was doing. Ramachandran touched Tom's body with the tip of a cotton swab and asked him where he felt the cotton swab touching his body. Ramachandran touched his cheek and asked him, "Where did you feel it?" Tom replied, "You touched my cheek." Ramachandran asked him, "Did you feel anything else?" He replied, "It's a little funny, you touched my missing thumb." Ramachandran moved the cotton swab to his upper lip and asked him, "Where did it touch now?" "You touched my index finger and my upper lip." "Is that true? Are you sure?" "Yes, I felt it in both places."

Thus, Ramachandran found a map of Tom’s phantom limb in his face. The secret is that the representation of the tactile cortex of the brain is reorganized after the loss of the arm, and normally the representation of the face is right next to the representation of the hand (see Figure 1 again). After Tom lost his hand, the sensory fibers that normally came from the face invaded the now empty representation of the hand and activated the cells there. That is why when Tom touched Tom’s face, he felt that his long-lost hand was also touched. No ghosts or spirits here! [5]

Ramachandran's endless curiosity has led his work to involve many "mysterious" areas that no one dared to explore in the past, such as synesthesia, anesthesia, aesthetics and even religious beliefs, and he is called "Marco Polo of neuroscience" by his peers.

question

Nobel Prize winner and American physicist Richard Feynman said that doubt and getting to the bottom of things are his nature, which is also the basis for his continuous innovation and becoming a scientific master. Feynman believes that science is to doubt the judgments of predecessors and to test them through practice. He said: "It is necessary to re-test the results of discovery with new direct experience, rather than blindly believe in the racial experience of previous generations. This is how I see it, and this is my best definition of science." "We must teach how to accept predecessors, but also how to reject predecessors... It is very dangerous to believe that the masters of previous generations are infallible." [6] Cajal also advised future generations: "Respect authority in moderation and do not worship blindly." "No theory, method or experimental paradigm is perfect. Do not defend or deny your teacher's mistakes, but find new problems that need to be solved from them."

Figure 2 US stamp with Feynman's photo (cited from
http://www.phschool.com/science/science_news/articles/dr_feynman.html)

The Renaissance was the cradle of scientific questioning. A good example of this is the story of Andreas Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy, questioning the Western "medical saint" Galen of Pergamon (see: The young man who digs graves and steals corpses in the middle of the night: I am here to bury Caesar | Unfolding). Galen was a gladiator doctor in ancient Rome. He dissected many animals (dissection of the human body was not allowed at the time) and believed that the human body was the same. In the following 14 centuries, no one dared to doubt Galen's judgment. Galen's book was as unquestionable as the Yellow Emperor's Canon of Internal Medicine. Medical education at that time was: the professor sat high in the classroom, reading Galen's "scripture" by heart; an operator who was both a barber and a surgeon performed dissection on the dissection table in the hall; an assistant on the side pointed out to the students when the professor mentioned a certain place or the operator dissected a certain place (Figure 3). Vesalius reformed this teaching method and combined the three into one. It was because he personally dissected the human body that he was able to see the fallacies of Galen's teachings. He also developed a strong belief: if it was not through his own dissection practice or personal observation, he would rather not mention it than believe in other people's conclusions. His advice to students was to pay attention to the dissection of corpses and observe carefully, "Don't trust everything said in the anatomy book in the future." Visa later published a masterpiece "The Structure of the Human Body" based on his own dissection and observation results. The predecessor most cited in the book was Galen, but most of them pointed out Galen's mistakes. He wrote: "I am extremely surprised at my stupidity and blind belief in Galen, which prevented me from seeing the truth before."

Figure 3 Illustration from a medical book during the Renaissance. In the picture, a group of students are gathered around a dissecting table. The lecturer is sitting high in the classroom, the dissector is dissecting, and the assistant is pointing with a small stick. (Quoted from
http://www.kunstkopie.de/kunst/italian_school_15th_century/the_dissection_illustration_fr_hi.jpg)

Questioning means not blindly believing everything in books and rumors in society. We should ask why and whether everything makes sense. This is true not only for knowledge in books and other overwhelming media propaganda, but also for our own prejudices. Not blindly believing in others does not mean being stubborn. When your favorite ideas do not conform to the actual situation, you should reflect on them. Only practice is the only criterion for testing the truth. Francis Crick, a British biologist who was one of the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, said in summarizing his successful experience: "So what is worthy of praise for me and Watson (Crick's collaborator, who won the Nobel Prize with Crick)? If there is anything, it may be that when certain assumptions are untenable, we are always happy and determined to abandon them. One critic thought that we must not be very smart because we made so many mistakes. But this is the only way for scientific discovery. Many attempts fail not because the researchers are not smart enough, but because they get into a dead end or give up quickly when they encounter difficulties." [7]

Niels Bohr, a great Danish physicist and one of the founders of modern atomic theory, was a person who paid a high price for criticism. During World War II, he escaped from the clutches of the Nazis in Denmark and went to the United States to help develop the atomic bomb. At that time, he was a world-famous master in the physics world. Many people regarded him as the "God" in his field and regarded every word of his as a criterion, not daring to have a trace of doubt. He discovered this problem when he visited Los Alamos, the center of atomic bomb development in the United States. Feynman was still a young man at the time and happened to be working there. Later, he recalled such an incident: after he listened to Bohr's report for the first time, he suddenly received a call from Bohr's son who accompanied Bohr to visit, asking him to meet with Bohr early the next morning. Feynman was very surprised because they had never met before, and at that report, there were particularly many listeners who came to admire Bohr's reputation, and Feynman was sitting in the back row, and could only vaguely see Bohr's shadow from the gaps between the densely packed heads in front. What did the great Bohr have to say to Feynman, who was still unknown at the time?

When they met, Bohr immediately raised a big question: How to increase the power of the atomic bomb? He proposed an idea and asked Feynman for his opinion. But as soon as Feynman talked about his favorite physics topic, he forgot everything else and even forgot who he was talking to. So his answer was: "No! This doesn't work, it's not effective, and so on." Bohr proposed a second plan. Feynman's answer was: "This sounds more decent, but it contains such a stupid idea..." In this way, one idea after another, the old and the young kept arguing. Finally, Bohr said: "Okay, now we can invite those big guys in." Then everyone discussed together. Feynman later learned from young Bohr that after that lecture, Bohr said to his son: "Remember the name of the young man sitting in the back row? He is the only one who is not afraid of me. Only he can point out my ridiculous ideas. It is not enough to just find those who can only say: "Yes, Dr. Bohr". Let's talk to that kid first." This is how the above scene happened.

Perseverance

It can be said that perseverance is a quality shared by all successful people. If a person has the qualities of curiosity and questioning, but lacks perseverance, he will never succeed. Pavlov once said, "If I insist on something, even a cannon can't knock me down." Marie Curie said, "People must have perseverance, otherwise they will accomplish nothing." "I have never been lucky, and I will never expect luck in the future. My highest principle is: never give in to any difficulties."

Now let’s go back to Cajal. In 1887, Cajal saw a specimen of neural tissue stained with Golgi’s method for the first time at a friend’s house. He was so struck by the clarity and beauty of the specimen that he could not sleep that night. The next day, he visited the friend again, just to see the specimen again. He later described his feelings at the time as “I was stunned and could not take my eyes off the microscope.” After returning home, he conducted experiments according to Golgi’s method. Although the method was not very stable, sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not; Cajal was not discouraged at all. In just a few weeks, he actually repeated almost everything Golgi had described. He “understood that I had discovered a rich field, and I immediately used this method and threw myself into work, not just eagerly, but desperately.”[8]

When Camillo Golgi invented the staining method, only the cell bodies and a small number of proximal processes and some poorly stained isolated nerve fibers could be seen. As a result, people mistakenly believed that nerve cells were fused together to form a large network like the cardiovascular system. This view is called the "net theory". Golgi himself firmly believed in this.

Cajal improved the Golgi stain and was eager to use it to stain different parts of the nervous systems of many different species. Later, when he recalled this period, he said: "I discovered many new phenomena in my specimens, my mind was full of ideas, and the enthusiasm for publishing filled my heart." [8]

Figure 4 Cajal's depiction of various neurons in the auditory cortex. In the picture, you can clearly see the cell body and the dendrites and axons that emanate from it. (Quoted from Santiago Ramón y Cajal: "Texture of the Nervous System of Man and the Vertebrates")

It was through such extensive research that Cajal believed that nerve cells were not an exception to the cell theory that had been established at the time, and that the nervous system was also composed of independent nerve cells. However, Golgi was stubborn and criticized Cajal's neuron theory in his acceptance speech when he and Cajal shared the Nobel Prize. Cajal had to respond tit for tat, and he insisted on looking for more evidence to support the neuron theory.

Cajal once emphasized: "I am not really a genius, I am... a tireless worker." Once he visited London and was invited to stay at Charles Scott Sherrington's house. Cajal asked them not to clean for him. Later, Sherrington's family accidentally entered the room and found a microscope and many slices inside. It turned out that he was still working during the trip! Among Cajal's advice to future generations, the last one is: "The attitude towards failure can be as simple as four words: keep trying."

In order to spread and defend his neuron theory, Cajal worked until the very end of his life. His student Penfield remembered the last time he visited him: "We found him sitting upright on his bed, writing a manuscript, with books piled around his bed and ink spilled all over the wall to his right. His recent deafness and weakness were closing the door to the world, but his eyes gleamed from under his hairy brows, revealing an unextinguished fire."[9] In his last moments, he was still writing Neuronismo ó Reticularismo, leaving his legacy to the world.

Coincidentally, Crick also worked until his last breath to solve the mystery of consciousness. He was still writing papers until a few hours before his death. He never talked about his illness to visiting friends, but still talked about various problems in consciousness research. He treated his illness with an extremely rational attitude. Others could not see that he was uneasy about it, and he never made his friends uneasy. His good friend Ramachandran recalled: "Three weeks before he died, I went to visit him at his home in La Jolla. ... During the more than two hours I was there, we did not mention his illness at all, but only discussed various ideas about the neural basis of consciousness. ... When I left, he said: 'Rama, I think the secret of consciousness lies in the claustrum, what do you think? Otherwise, why is it connected to so many areas in the brain?' Then he winked at me meaningfully. This was the last time I saw him."

Although not everyone can identify their goals from a young age, people will try to find goals that are truly suitable for them, but once these masters have identified their goals, they will be extremely persistent and unyielding.

The 2014 Nobel Prize winners Edvard I. Moser and May-Britt Moser (see: How did two isolated island teenagers grow up to become a Nobel Prize couple?) were born in two working-class families on a small Norwegian island. They studied psychology at university, but like Kandel, they were curious about the neural mechanisms of psychological phenomena. Fortunately, there was a brain science master who studied memory, Per Andersen, in their school, and they wanted to be his master's students. Unfortunately, Anderson didn't like psychologists very much, and his research group was full. If it were someone else, they might have given up, but the two of them were determined to talk to him, and they would not leave unless he agreed to accept them. Anderson couldn't pester them any more, so he finally said, "Well, if you really want to do your master's research here, then you should read this article (an article by Morris on water mazes) and let me see if you can understand it, and then build a water maze laboratory in the same way. If you do it, then I will accept you to pursue a master's degree in my laboratory." Such a request might have discouraged many people, but Edward responded, "That's great, because we also want to pursue a doctorate with you." In the end, they were busy with their normal studies during the day and built water mazes at night, and finally got their wish and became Anderson's master's students.

After completing their master's degrees, they both wanted to continue their doctoral studies with Anderson, but there was only one funding slot available. May-Britt gave this slot to Edward. However, Anderson told her that if she was willing to study the effects of drinking on hippocampal synapses in animals, he could apply for another slot for her through his colleagues in the Department of Toxicology. But May-Britt didn't like this topic, which had nothing to do with neural mechanisms. She was deeply interested in using a laser scanning confocal microscope to study whether the number of synapses would increase after learning. Anderson was not optimistic about her plan at all, thinking that it was impossible to do and that she would not be able to apply for a scholarship. But May-Britt was not a girl who gave up easily. She went to his office again and again, but he couldn't persuade her, so he finally agreed to give it a try. To his surprise, both May-Britt and Edward's applications were approved. May-Britt later recalled: "It was around this time that I realized how persistent I was. I had always been nice and polite, but if I really wanted something, no one could stop me." Edward also recalled: "... maybe my personality played a role. I had a strong will, and I would focus on a specific goal and persist even if it took decades to achieve it."

The road to science is not always filled with sunshine and flowers. Only warriors who can endure loneliness, fear no hardships, and forge ahead can climb to the pinnacle of science. Kandel said: "Although I am deeply satisfied with my scientific career, it is by no means easy. ... Like anyone who explores the unknown, I sometimes feel lonely, unsure, and without a ready-made path to follow. Whenever I embark on a new path, there are always some kind friends and colleagues who dissuade me (including Nobel Prize winner Eccles and American neuroscience master Kufrin - author's note). I had to learn to be at ease with this insecurity early on and trust my own judgment on some key issues."

Milner also said: "Looking back over the past 50 years, I seem to have been very lucky. I always appear in the right place at the right time. On the other hand, I am very persistent in my goals and am not intimidated by the difficulties I face..."

Due to space limitations, this article only cites a few examples that impressed me the most. If you want to understand that these 29 masters all possess these 3i qualities, then it is best to read my humble book "Discovering the Brain: Who Opened the Mind Journey?" [2] This article can only be regarded as an introduction. I hope that after readers have some understanding of these 3i qualities, they can read their biographies. Perhaps they will have a deeper understanding and be willing to cultivate their own 3i qualities in a way that suits them.

References

[1] Gu Fanji (2022) 10 ways of studying from brain science masters. Fanpu, March 20, 2022. Reprinted in Voice of the Wind and Cloud and Neuroreality, March 22.

[2] Gu Fanji (2021) Discovering the Brain: Who Started the Journey of Mind?, Shanghai Science and Technology Education Press

[3] Beveridge, J. (1979). The Art of Scientific Research. Science Press.

[4] Ramachandran, VS (2011). The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: WW Norton & Company.

[5] Ramachandran, VS, & Blakeslee, S (1998). Phantoms in the Brain. William Morrow, NY

Chinese translation: Ramachandran, Gu Fanji (2018). Phantoms in the Brain. Changsha, Hunan Science and Technology Press.

[6] Feynman, Stop It, Mr. Feynman, translated by Wu Chengyuan (1997). Sanlian Bookstore.

[7] Crick, J., The Pursuit of Enthusiasm (1994), translated by Lü Xiangdong and Tang Xiaowei, University of Science and Technology of China Press.

[8] Cajal, S. Ramón y (1917) Recuerdos de mi vida, Vol. 2, Historia de mi labor científica[M]. Madrid: Moya. English translation: Recollections of my life (trans. EH Craigie with the assistance of J. Cano), Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1937. Reprinted Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

[9] Sherrington, CS (1935). "Santiago Ramón y Cajal. 1852-1934". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 1 (4): 424–441. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1935.0007 (https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frsbm.1935.0007).

Notes

[1] Due to space limitations, all quotations from my work [2] have already been cited in the article, so I will not cite them here.

Produced by: Science Popularization China

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