These spindle-shaped brain cells, called von Economo neurons-named for the man who first described them-are found only in human beings, great apes and a handful of other notably gregarious creatures. Taking well over an hour, he carved off 136 paper-thin sections.Īllman was searching for a peculiar kind of brain cell that he suspects is a key to how the African elephant-like a human being-manages to stay attuned to the ever-shifting nuances of social interplay. Allman carefully sliced it using the laboratory equivalent of a deli meat cutter. Preserved in formaldehyde, it looked like half a pancake, frozen solid on a misting bed of dry ice. ![]() About a dozen years after Simba died at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, a half-inch slab of her yellowish, wrinkled, basketball-size brain was laid out before John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. There was little chance of missing the elephant in the room.
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