Michael S. A. Graziano

Michael S. A. Graziano is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. He is also a writer, composer, and occasional ventriloquist. He is the author of many books (both novels and neuroscience books), and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. His research at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute has spanned topics from movement control to how the brain processes the space around the body. His current work focuses on the brain basis of consciousness.

For thirty years, Charlie Gross of Princeton University headed one of the most consequential neuroscience labs of the twentieth century, hidden behind locked doors in a secret wing of an old stone building. Michael Graziano, a member of that elite group of lab mates for twenty years, writes about Charlie’s Lab, the place and the people in it. The result is a book every bit as strange, counterculture, and colorful as the lab itself and the man who oversaw it.

Praise for Charlie’s Lab

Charlie's Lab is a mesmerizing, brilliantly rendered, utterly fascinating total immersion in the labyrinthine passageways and spaces of a neuroscience research laboratory that was razed more than twenty years ago at Princeton University. Michael Graziano has focused his extraordinary powers of imagination, oneiric recall, and language to bring alive—here, the cliché "bringing alive" is justified—that remarkable lost world conjured into being by the vibrant, expansive, and unpredictable personality of the head of the lab, Professor Charlie Gross. This is one of the most warmly sympathetic memoirs I have ever read—as well as the most idiosyncratic—a history of a singular place now lost to time which, through the power of Michael Graziano's ardent imagination, continues to live in a perpetual present, at high noon, with Charlie Gross stomping along a corridor calling out to his younger colleagues, "Lunch? Lunch?"

—Joyce Carol Oates

Charlie Gross's lab was a unique and inspiring place, reflecting the uncommon brilliance and personality of its namesake. Michael Graziano captures the essence of that lost space, where ideas seemed to seep out from the walls.

—Earl Miller, Professor of Neuroscience, MIT