“These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: And Other True Stories of Trauma, Madness, Affliction, and Recovery That Reveal the Surprising History of the Human Brain Tatsuji Inouye, a Japanese ophthalmologist, had the uncomfortable job of calculating how much of a pension these speckled-blind soldiers should receive, based on the percentage of vision lost. Japanese soldiers who were shot through the back of the brain-through the vision centers, in the occipital lobe-often woke up to find themselves with tiny blind spots, as if they were wearing glasses spattered with black paint. Fast enough to penetrate the skull but small enough to avoid messy shattering, these bullets made clean, precise wounds like worm tracks through an apple.

These soldiers were armed with high-speed rifles whose tiny, quarter-inch bullets rocketed from the muzzle at fourteen hundred miles per hour. Russia had long coveted a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean, so in 1904 the czar sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Manchuria and Korea to bully one away from the Japanese.

“The twentieth century’s first major discovery about vision came about, once again, because of war.

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery 'Are there any who imagine,' Holman asked, 'that my loss of eyesight must necessarily deny me the enjoyment of such contemplation? How much more do I pity the mental darkness which could give rise to such an error.” Hearing a woman's voice and feeling her caresses - and then filling in what was missing with his own fancy - gave him more pleasure than the mere sight of a women ever had, he said, a pleasure beyond reality. Moreover, he didn't care: by abandoning the standards of the sighted world, he argues, he could tap into a more divine and more authentic beauty. Disarmingly, he admitted that he had no idea what his paramours looked like, or even whether they were homely. In it, Holman was reminiscing about a few rendezvous from his past. Only one passage stands out for its frank discussion of his handicap and how it changed his worldview.

“In fact, his travelogues spend amazingly little time discussing his blindness.

The tale of the dueling neurosurgeons