«José Ramón Alonso exudes humanity and that makes it a pleasure to read and listen to it. His stories on Neuroscience are entertaining and amazing. A good material to know who we are. »
Ima Sanchís, La Vanguardia, La Contra.

★Simplified Chinese rights sold!
★Spain Amazon's best-selling list of neurology category No.6! Neuroscience No.18! New work of the famous Spanish neuroscientist and cell biologist, winner of Prisma prize, Teresa Pinillos International Contest for Scientific Dissemination and the Fray Luis de León Prize, Jose Ramon Alonso.
★The brain is the tool for our curiosity about the world. The engine of scientific and technological advances. Our evolutionary success as a species. We are what our brain is.

Weighing only one and a half kilograms, the brain is the most fascinating structure in the Universe. About eighty-six billion neurons connected to each other by trillions of contacts. In it reside our past, our present and our future. To know its unexplored history is to know the pulsating story of humanity.

The rivers of Babylon, mummies, papyri, ancient China, the Dutch anatomists, Hippocrates, Swammerdam, Leonardo, Hooke, Paré, the sages of La Salpêtrière, Parkinson and Mao, Jackson, Jekyll and Hyde, the duel of the sausage and the cell theory, the unusual case of Phineas Gage, Darwin's bulldog and gorilla, Watson and little Albert, the fighter Lina Stern, the Vogts and Lenin's brain, Brodmann's cortical maps, the giant squid axon, the slug man ...
We have always wanted to know where genius resided and how madness arose, what was it that distinguished us from animals, whether we were the receptacle of thinking spirits or an automaton that responded in a reflexive way to the stimuli it received. From Galeno to Cajal, from Descartes to Rita Levi-Montalcini, we have scrutinized throughout history what was hidden inside our skull and how it made us who we were. Studying the history of the brain throughout the centuries is a science and history lesson, an introduction to the evolution of thought, to the vision of man in each age, to a history full of passions and creativity, of well-known characters. and others that are forgotten, of ideas carried away by the torrent of time and others that, even rejected, remain with us.

José Ramón Alonso tells us in a descriptive way, as well as entertaining, how science has been discovering and understanding the most essential organ for being human; how its knowledge has evolved, its conception, its functions, the diseases that torment us, psychiatry, surgery, neuroscience ... This is the history of humanity.

JOSÉ RAMÓN ALONSO PEÑA (Valladolid, 1962). Doctor from the University of Salamanca. Professor of Cell Biology and Director of the Laboratory of Neuronal Plasticity and Neurorepair of the Institute of Neurosciences of Castilla y León. He has been Rector of the University of Salamanca and researcher and visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt, the University of Kiel, the University of California-Davis and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. Invited speaker at universities in Spain, Germany, Sweden, Chile, Denmark, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Turkey and the United States, he has published fifteen books and numerous scientific articles in the main international journals of his specialty. He frequently writes about scientific dissemination and the university world in the Spanish press (El País, ABC, El Mundo, Expansión ...). He has won the "Teresa Pinillos International Contest for Scientific Dissemination" at the University of La Rioja and the "Fray Luis de León Prize" for essays, as well as several short story contests. His two previous works, The nose of Charles Darwin and other stories of Neuroscience (Almuzara, 2012) and The writer who could not read and other stories of Neuroscience (Guadalmazán, 2013) received Prisma awards, the award for the best works of scientific dissemination that summons and grants the House of Sciences (Coruñeses Scientific Museums). He has also published Who Stole Jfk's Brain? (Cálamo, 2015), The man who spoke with dolphins and other stories of Neuroscience (Guadalmazán, 2015), Unusual Botany (Next Door Publishers, 2016) and An Eskimo in New York and other stories of Neuroscience (Guadalmazán, 2016 ).