The father of modern neuroscience discovered the basic unit of the nervous system

His surprising aide? Preindustrial Spanish countryside. In the late 19th century, most scientists believed that the brain was composed of a continuous tangle of fires like a twisting labyrinth until Santiago Ramón y Cajal changed the study of neuroscience as we know it. Benjamin Ehrlich, the author of "The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal", looks back at his extraordinary life and how his childhood in Spain helped him decipher the images on his slides.