"Before Francis Crick died, in 2004, he gave Eagleman some advice. “Look,” he said. “The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong.” Eagleman may have taken the words a little too much to heart. When I was in Houston, he had more than a dozen studies running simultaneously, and spent his time racing from laboratory to lecture hall to MRI machine to brain-surgery ward and back. “We’re using the full armamentarium of modern neuroscience,” he told me. One of his nine lab members was studying the neurological roots of empathy; another was looking at free will. Two were studying timing disorders in schizophrenics; one had helped create the world’s foremost database of synesthetes.
Eagleman had projects on epilepsy, counterfeiting, decision-making in courts, and timing deficits among brain-damaged veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as four books at various stages of completion. In early April, Eagleman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on synesthesia. In May, Pantheon will publish “Incognito,” his popular account of the unconscious.
“Did I mention my paper on the asp caterpillar?” he asked me one day. He pulled up a picture on his computer of what looked like a grub in a fancy fur coat. It was a highly venomous insect, he assured me. He knew this because one of them had crawled up his leg seven years earlier. “It felt like someone had just poured a glass of acid on my shin,” he said. In the hospital that night, an emergency-room doctor called him a wimp. “Haven’t you been bitten by a bug before?” he said. So Eagleman, by way of reply, spent the next few years rounding up every known case report of asp-caterpillar envenomation. He created the first map of the caterpillar’s distribution in North America, as well as graphs of a hundred and eighty-eight attacks, broken down by month and symptom. Then he published his report, extensively footnoted, in the journal Clinical Toxicology. “It turns out that I’m the world’s expert on this thing,” he told me, grinning."
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Eagleman had projects on epilepsy, counterfeiting, decision-making in courts, and timing deficits among brain-damaged veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as four books at various stages of completion. In early April, Eagleman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on synesthesia. In May, Pantheon will publish “Incognito,” his popular account of the unconscious.
“Did I mention my paper on the asp caterpillar?” he asked me one day. He pulled up a picture on his computer of what looked like a grub in a fancy fur coat. It was a highly venomous insect, he assured me. He knew this because one of them had crawled up his leg seven years earlier. “It felt like someone had just poured a glass of acid on my shin,” he said. In the hospital that night, an emergency-room doctor called him a wimp. “Haven’t you been bitten by a bug before?” he said. So Eagleman, by way of reply, spent the next few years rounding up every known case report of asp-caterpillar envenomation. He created the first map of the caterpillar’s distribution in North America, as well as graphs of a hundred and eighty-eight attacks, broken down by month and symptom. Then he published his report, extensively footnoted, in the journal Clinical Toxicology. “It turns out that I’m the world’s expert on this thing,” he told me, grinning."
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