History of Neuroscience

• Act of drilling a hole in the skull to let out evil spirits that caused someone to behave weirdly 
• Evidence of it since Neolithic times, cave paintings indicate people thought it cured epilepsy and other mental disorders- Brothwel (1963)

• 3000BC Ancient Egyptians wrote about treatments for brain damage
• They observed that damage to one hemisphere of the brain affects movement/sensation on the contralateral side of the body

• Greek philosopher from460-377 BC
• Argued that the brain was essential for the mind and behaviour

• Greek philosopher from 439-347BC
• Argued that reason and perception lay in the head, passions in the heart and lungs, liver and guts

• Greek philosopher from 384-322BC
• Argued that sensations and control is governed by the heart, the brain served to cool the blood

• Greek physician in Rome from 129-199 AD
• Argued the Brain was responsible for sensation and behaviour

• Anatomist from 1514-1564
• Argued the ventricles were crucial for sensation and movement

• Philosopher from 1596-1650
• Argued that the brain and soul were separate

• Italian Physician and Physicist from 1737-98
• Experimented with electrocuting nerves causing 'reanimation' of limbs

• German Polymath from 1801 –1858
• Argued that the kind of sensation following stimulation of a sensory nerve does not depend on the mode of stimulation but upon the nature of the sense organ.
• Thus light, pressure, or mechanical stimulation acting on the retina and optic nerve invariably produces luminous impressions.
• This he termed the law of specific energies of the sense.

• Physiologist from 1758-1828
• Argued that specific functions are localised to different regions of the brain
• People with larger regions were better at that function
• This is termed Phrenology

• French Physiologist from 1794-1867
• Founder of experimental brain science
• Found no evidence for the phrenologists view of functional specialization (i.e. that language in the brain under the eye, etc)

• French polymath from 1824-80
• Discovered ‘Broca’s area’ in the frontal lobes
• This region (typically left hemisphere) is responsible for the production of speech
• Established the dominance of the left hemisphere for language

• German Anatomist and Physician from 1848-1905
• Discovered ‘Wernicke’s Area’ in the posterior temporal lobe which is responsible for language comprehension

• 1835-1911
• Gave important insights in cerebral function from the study of brain damaged patients

• Railway worker
• He had an iron pole blown through the front of his head through his eye
• Survived but his personality and intellect was altered
• Improved our understanding of the frontal lobe

They used electrical stimulation in the cortex to reveal the organisation of the motor cortex in experimental animals

• Caused major advances in the understanding of neurons using microscopes and staining methods
• Golgi argued neurons were not individual entities but a collective mass
• Cajal argued neurons were separate (neuron hypothesis) and provided insights in how cells might participate in learning

• A German Physician and Physicist from 1821 –1894
• In physiology and psychology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and empiricism

• 1857 - 1952
• Influential work on reflexes and the general principles of the nervous system

• Canadian neurosurgeon from 1891 –76
• Developed a method for stimulating the brain during surgery to determine regions to avoid resecting
• Mapped out the human motor and somatosensory cortices

• Born 1918
• Showed that the medial temporal lobe amnestic syndrome is characterized by an inability to acquire new memories and an inability to recall established memories from a few years immediately before damage, while memories from the more remote past and other cognitive abilities, including language, perception and reasoning were intact in HM