Previously Featured Essays:
A Unified Theory of the BrainKnopf, originally published 1911
(Issue 7 ? posted May 2, 1997; archived May 30, 1997)Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.
I don't know whether you have ever seen a map of a person's mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child's mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and eaves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast-going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all; but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needlework, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on; and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.
Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John's, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingoes flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents; but on the whole the Neverlands have a family resemblance, and if they stood still in a row you could say of them that they have each other's nose, and so forth. On these magic shores children at play are forever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.
J.M. Barrie (1860-1937), a British writer who often wrote of his disenchantment with adulthood, originally wrote Peter Pan as a play in 1904, and it has been performed in England every Christmas since. In 1911 the story was published as a book under the title Peter and Wendy.
Endlinks
Peter Pan - Barrie's full text available from Project Gutenberg.
Brain Browser - from an interdisciplinary group at Harvard Medical School (the Surgical Planning Laboratory), an interactive atlas of the brain that can be browsed with Java-compatible viewers. The goal "was to develop an interactive program with 3-D renderings that could run on machines without 3-D graphics acceleration. The scenario that we had in mind for this applet is a classroom with a workstation-style server and PCs/Macs/WebPCs for the pupils. The viewer requires some imaging capabilities (such as needed for movies), but no 3-D graphics capabilities. A fairly high network bandwidth (such as ISDN or better) is necessary."
The Clickable Brain - this one is Drosophila's, presented by a group in Freiburg, Germany. Clicking on a 2-D or 3-D color graphical map brings forward detailed micrographs with descriptions and references for that section. Also includes posters and research articles on "flybrain" research.
p>ShuffleBrain: How does the brain store the mind? - a site by Paul Pietsch, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Indiana University. An eclectic mix of fiction, humor, scientific articles, speculations, and musings about the functioning of the brain (the hologram theory). Includes a cartoon map of the limbic system and photojournalism inside the human skull - for comparison with the Neverland map.The BrainTainment Center - California-based company selling software for IQ testing and games for sharpening thinking skills. This site provides free demo downloads of the software as well as on-line "brain checkup" tests of your wisdom, attention-deficit proficiency, spatial intelligence quotient, and brain hemispheric dominance. Also find articles on the brain, discussion groups, brain teasers, and an on-line oracle ("intuition tutor").
How Brains Think: Emerging Intelligence, Then and Now - a book by William H. Calvin published in 1996 by Basic Books. This site synopsizes the book, provides review snippets, and has links for purchasing. The book is an expansion of Calvin's 1994 essay for Scientific American, The Emergence of Intelligence ("Life in the Universe" special issue), which addresses the evolution of consciousness, intelligence, and language (available as full text on the Web, with related Medline links on the subject).
You can purchase this book from
Tell us about your favorite essay via Feedback.