The brain’s voyage from puzzled babyhood to dexterous adolescence leaves an indelible mark on anyone who witnesses that transformation. I thank my sister for her unknowing participation in a few of my early harebrained “studies,” and for her later enthusiastic encouragement of my slightly more sophisticated forays into neuroscience. One of the points of this book is that human memory is not well suited to store certain types of information, such as names. So in an effort to decrease the amount of information that the majority of readers may not need to know, I sometimes omitted the names of the authors of studies from the main text. In the endnotes, however, I made every effort to attribute the findings to those scientists who are primarily responsible for them, but I apologize in advance for those instances in which I failed to give credit where credit is due. It is an unfortunate fact of science that not all scientific findings prove to be correct in the long run. Progress in science requires that multiple independent groups eventually replicate the findings of others.
