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Broca's brain: brother, wherefore art thou?

Article Excerpt
"I washed your brain, but I had trouble getting the think stains out."



Cindy (character in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, 2002)

The Musee de I'Homme (Museum of Man) was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet, for the splendiferous event of the World's Fair in Paris. Amid the lavishness of the Fair exhibits was Pablo Picasso's Guernica, commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion and hailed by many as modern art's most dramatic antiwar statement. The Museum of Man is the descendant of the Musee d'Ethnographie du Trocadero founded in 1918 and occupies most of the Passy wing of the Palais de Chaillot in the 16th arrondissement. In 1937 the world was boiling with social unrest with the continuing tragedies of the Spanish Civil War (the inspiration for Picasso's mural) as well as the architectural posturing of Soviet and Nazi Germany architects and edifices. The mounting social turmoil did not prevent 32 million visitors from enjoying boat races on the Seine, grand boxing championships, horse racing, and a wine harvesting festival (Herbert, 1998). Ice cream, hamburgers, and fairy floss, reincarnated as cotton candy, were already around and popular thanks to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and the visitors on the banks of the Seine marveled at the Trocadero and Chaillot palace as a perfect repository for a museum dedicated to the natural history of humankind.

Carl Sagan, the Harvard and Cornell researcher and professor of astrophysics who became famous for his popularization of astronomy and debunking of junk science, wrote an influential book in 1979 entitled Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (Sagan, 1979). I remember reading that...