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177 illustrations
In 1949, Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb proposed a principle that would revolutionize our understanding of the brain: neurons that fire together wire together. For decades,...
In January 1922, fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson lay dying in Toronto General Hospital. He weighed barely sixty-five pounds. Type 1 diabetes was consuming him — his...
Inside a chrysalis, something astonishing happens that most biology textbooks gloss over. The caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings. Its body releases digestive enzymes that dissolve...
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean is a man crushed by his past. After nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread,...
In 1871, a small group of students from Fisk University in Nashville stood before audiences who did not want to hear them. They were formerly...
In 2000, neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire at University College London made a remarkable discovery. She scanned the brains of London taxi drivers — professionals who spend...
In 1967, psychologist Martin Seligman conducted a groundbreaking experiment at the University of Pennsylvania that revealed something heartbreaking about captivity. Dogs were placed in a...
In 1941, Henri Matisse was seventy-one years old and recovering from surgery that left him largely confined to a wheelchair or bed. The man who...
In 1886, a young French sculptor named Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi watched as workers on Bedloe's Island removed the last wooden scaffolding from around the Statue...
In 1905, Albert Einstein solved a puzzle that had baffled physicists for years. Scientists knew that shining light on certain metals could knock electrons free...
In 2005, Dr. Sarah Sallon of Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem did something no one believed possible. She took a date palm seed recovered from...
On Easter Sunday, 1939, contralto Marian Anderson stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and sang. Weeks earlier, the Daughters of the American Revolution...
In the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, just down the hallway from the famous *David*, stand four unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo known as the *Prisoners* or...
In orthopedic medicine, there is a condition called ankylosis — the fusing of a joint caused by injury, infection, or prolonged immobility. The bones that...
For most of the twentieth century, neuroscience operated under a grim assumption: the adult brain could not grow new cells. What you had was all...
In 1967, psychologist Martin Seligman made a startling discovery at the University of Pennsylvania. During his research on behavioral conditioning, he found that animals subjected...
Every autumn in the forests of northern Canada, the wood frog does something that should be impossible. As temperatures plunge, its body freezes solid. No...
In 1669, the Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam became the first scientist to carefully dissect a caterpillar chrysalis and document what he found inside. What he...
For most of the twentieth century, neuroscience taught a discouraging idea: the adult brain was fixed. Whatever pathways you had laid down by early adulthood...
In C.S. Lewis's *The Last Battle*, the dwarfs sit in a bright, sunlit field, yet they are convinced they are trapped in a dark, filthy...
Biologists have long marveled at one of nature's most radical transformations. Inside a chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings. It dissolves. Digestive enzymes break...
In the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, just down the hallway from the famous *David*, stand four unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo known as the *Prisoners*. They...
In his *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass*, Douglass describes a pivotal moment from his childhood in slavery. His slaveholder's wife, Sophia Auld, had...
In John Bunyan's *The Pilgrim's Progress*, one of the most striking moments comes early in Christian's journey. He has been walking with an enormous burden...