The Idea of the Brain Quotes

“Brains, unlike any machine, have not been designed. They are organs that have evolved for over five hundred million years, so there is little or no reason to expect they truly function like the machines we create.”
― Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

“Another route by which Galen’s ideas were transmitted during this period was through the work of the tenth-century physician ‘Alī ibn al-’Abbās Maǧūsī, known in the West as Haly Abbas–a historian has described him as ‘a Persian who took an Arab name and wrote in the language of the Qu’ran, a Zoroastrian who was imbibed with Greek traditions, a thinker from the Islamic world who was adopted by the Western Latin community less than a century after his death’.To emphasise the cosmopolitan mix of this period, his work was subsequently translated into Latin in Italy by a Christian monk who had been a Muslim refugee from North Africa.”
― Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience