Commentary: Why Study the History of Neuroscience?

The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography

Reviewed by: Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience Ronald S. Fishman Charles G. Gross. Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience. A Bradford Book. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. xviii + 255 pp. Ill. $32.50. How the brain does what it does is still one of the great enigmas of science, one with a long history and a rich cast of characters. Charles Gross, a senior member of the Department of Psychology at Princeton University, presents part of this history in five essays, versions of which have been previously published in journals such as The Neuroscientist, Cerebral Cortex, and Trends in Neurosciences. Gross’s narrative voice is clear and authoritative, and shows the best sort of storytelling when a working scientist takes the long view of his subject. The past thirty years have been a remarkably fertile period for an alliance of anatomists, physiologists, and biologically oriented psychologists (now styled as “cognitive neuroscientists,” since the otherwise honorable term “psychology” is deemed irredeemably “soft”). Two of the essays can be read in conjunction with Semir Zeki’s recent A Vision of the Brain (1993) to illustrate how crucial the study of vision has been in this progress. The account of how the temporal and parietal lobes were recognized as essential to vision-processing in higher animals reflects Gross’s own particular expertise, and describes the brick-on-brick pattern of practical science enlivened with occasional flashes of good luck. (During a session of single-cell recording from an awake monkey’s temporal cortex, the cell [End Page 538] 538is exasperatingly silent until the experimenter, probably in desperation, waves a hand in front of the eyes; so came to light the “hand” cell in the coding for object recognition in the temporal lobe.) Two essays, one on Leonardo da Vinci and one on the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose ideas of the brain were remarkably prescient, make the point that, in biology, theoretical ideas unsupported by a critical mass of supporting data tend to be stillborn. The gem of the collection to historians of ideas who love the byways and culs-de-sac, particularly those that show the social input into science, is the story of Richard Owen and Thomas Huxley and their controversy over an obscure piece of neuroanatomy, the so-called hippocampus minor. Owen, as Britain’s leading paleontologist and first director of the British Museum of Natural History, proposed this structure as unique to the human brain, thus justifying the placement of the human in its own special taxonomic category. Huxley demonstrated the structure quite readily in monkey and ape brains, and used it as a means of discrediting Owen and promoting Darwin’s theory of common descent. Gross found a glancing reference to this story in a recent biography of Darwin (Adrian Desmond and James R. Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist [1992]), appreciated its particularly piquant character, and rescued it from oblivion. Owen, condemned by unforgiving Darwinists, is just now emerging from a century of obscurity (Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist [1994]). And he has his revenge: the British Museum of Natural History displays his imposing bronze statue alone at the top of the stairs commanding the entrance hall, while the sitting statues of Darwin and Huxley are relegated to the lunchroom in the rear, where little children climb into Darwin’s lap as they would into their grandfather’s. Ronald S. Fishman St. Inigoes, Maryland Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press

American Journal of Human BiologyVolume 22, Issue 4 p. 569-569 Book Review Book review: A Hole in the Head: More Tales in the History of Neuroscience David A. Steinberg, David A. Steinberg Fiddletown Institute, Theory Division, Fiddletown, CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author David A. Steinberg, David A. Steinberg Fiddletown Institute, Theory Division, Fiddletown, CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 May 2010 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.21060AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume22, Issue4July/August 2010Pages 569-569 RelatedInformation

This review article critically surveys the following literature by placing it under the historiographical banner of ‘the history of the brain and mind sciences’: Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Katja Guenther, Localization and its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis & the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Stephen Casper and Delia Gavrus (eds), The History of the Brain and Mind Sciences: Technique, Technology, Therapy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017); Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Neurotechnologies of the Self: Mind, Brain and Subjectivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). This framework highlights contemporary attempts to historicize the integrative project of neuroscience and set the correct limits to interdisciplinary collaboration. While attempts to critically engage with the ‘neuro’ rhetoric of contemporary neuroscientists can seem at odds with historians seeking to write the history of neuroscience from the margins, it is argued that together these two projects represent a positive historiographical direction for the history of the neurosciences after the decade of the brain.

During my early introduction to architecture I found that I was motivated not only by matters pertaining to what architecture is, but also, to what it can do. Thus, the questions motivating this work derive from my education in architecture which, at their most rudimentary level, entail a deep fascination with the nature of space, and thus the problem of time. And, subsequently, a practical desire to understand the conditions that constituted experience, and thus perception, sensation and mind. My interest also developed from a general disposition towards others and world founded in principles of human equality and rights with respect to both freedom and responsibility. During my years practicing architecture, these questions as they were brought through the perspective of design continued to inspire me. At the same time, my interest in investigating these questions through theoretical and philosophical research persisted until my aspiration to engage in critical thought outpaced my desire to practice. Hence, a turn in career to work as an academic in the discipline of architecture and the area of architecture theory. This research may be perceived by some as situated outside the realm of architecture. However, this is not the case. My approach to architecture theory is not one that begins with a study of the object, or, for some, one might say the subject of architecture. That is, if the object is understood as the manifestation in thought, process or form of the building or built environment (real or conceived) itself; and if the subject is understood as the thought or idea emanating from the mind of the architect (as author). While there is much architecture theory advanced from this perspective lining my own bookshelves and utilized in my work as an educator. The concerns that have always called me towards thinking about architecture as the imagined and constructed world in which we live are those that query the very nature of concepts, notions, ideologies and intellectual constructions and beliefs upon which culture and society – architecture as both a cultural product and a social actor – are formed. This goes, as well, to the considerations that motivate my concern for people, not users or inhabitants as such, but as ontologically situated beings in the world. Accordingly, my work primarily deals with the content, history and effects of architecture as it relates to theories of space, time, the body, and cognition. Employing and developing theories and methods from disciplines including philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, political, social and economic theory, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences in the broadest sense. Admittedly, the nature of theoretical discourse has shown itself to be problematic over the past fifty-plus years; it has also proven to be transformative. Critical thinkers in the late 1960s developed a sustained critique of their philosophical predecessors – primarily in regard to Marx on one hand and Heidegger on the other – with a critique of social history and a displacement of metaphysics resulting in a repositioning of social and cultural discourse. Of course, the debate unfolded against the philosophical and aesthetic background of not only Marx and Heidegger, but also Nietzsche, Hegel and Freud on one hand, and Manet, Cézanne, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Wagner and Debussy on the other. In architecture, the debate extended to Ruskin and Wölfflin, and to Wright and Corbusier, amongst others. This period, in itself, refers to an unprecedented artistic, scientific, economic, and technological mutation. Prevalent underpinnings remain identifiable, for instance an attack on the absolute nature of knowledge, which has brought about a fundamental rethinking of both the nature of consciousness, as well as a critique of science. As Foucault suggested, one of the great problems that arose in the 1950s was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions that it could serve. Another rebuke can be seen as the challenge to the primacy of truth as an adequation of subject to thing. This culminated in a radical critique of subjectivity resulting, some years later, in the so-called post-humanist-subject. In order to be rid of the subject itself, Foucault, in ‘Truth and Power’ (1977) argued that it was necessary to dispense with the essentialist subject both at the extremes and in-between the enlightenment’s humanist subject and its ideals of knowledge as self-constituting; as well as phenomenology’s fabrication of the subject as evolving through and embodying the course of history. Reflecting on this history, that post-war moment of theory, one cannot help but be struck by the complexity and the ambiguity of the adventure; qualities most evident in the fact that new spaces and new means of writing and drawing, of thinking and making emerged. Ideas that modified our understanding of both communication and the image, of both space and time. Discourses, when combined with a reflexivity within certain architectures and certain texts, rendered them somehow indefinitely open. In the 1960s, literary theory transformed thought on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, Roland Barthes’s de-sanctioning of the biography-centric author, or the removal of authority from the author turned scriptor in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), or Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality with ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1969). These works impacted our thinking on linguistic phenomena and the origin (or non-originality) of textual content and further, on the invention of new forms of writing and affective relations. Such theories informed and redirected thinking in architecture, for instance, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas’s work ‘Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work’ was published in the first issue of Oppositions, an architectural journal produced between 1973 and 1984 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. With this, the influence of the French intellectual climate as well as the Italian discourse on semiotics was brought to the centre of Anglo-American discourse in architecture theory. The intellectual trajectory along which this history is traced and the terrain on which it now takes place will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the work of such thinkers as Henri Bergson, Louis Althusser, Gabriel Tarde, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and, of course, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurizio Lazzarato. The importance of the radically original works that emerged in the seventies and eighties cannot be overestimated, for instance: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works, translated into English shortly after their original publication, were being read throughout many disciplines outside of philosophy including schools of architecture, and their influence can only be said to have increased. I share the above brief history so as to situate my work for those less familiar with the work of theory – whether architecture or otherwise – as this, too, is the intellectual trajectory and exploration along which my own work, as well as many of my contemporaries, travels. In my own work, the influence of the nineteenth/ twentieth-century French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson – the great thinker of time and, as Walter Benjamin suggested, a seminal source to consult in considering the problem of experience – has quite profoundly informed my thinking and shaped its outcomes. Both with respect to time and space as well as body and brain, his influence is reflected in the title of this volume. That said, this is not a collection of chapters on Bergson’s philosophy. It is a collection on critical concepts I believe to be of importance for contemporary critique, delivered through topics that are relevant – at times directly and at others indirectly – to our current moment. This is a work of great commitment and it has sustained itself over time. It is my hope the reader finds some value in this as well.

The present article is a conceptual discussion about cognitive neuroscience and its interface with human development. For this purpose, we begin with a brief history of cognitive neuroscience, emphasizing its interdisciplinary nature. Afterwards we discuss some concepts of neuropsychology such as perceptual and cognitive development, general development of the nervous system, the formation of the brain, synaptic plasticity and cellular and molecular bases of cognition. Finally we emphasize that there is no way to separate the behavior from its biological basis, understanding that the nervous system is a necessary condition for the occurrence of behavior, thoughts and feelings, though it may not be a sufficient condition for the emergence of consciousness and behavioral phenomena.

This thesis investigates the legality of colours and the implications of colours within public spaces. By legality of colours, this thesis references the quality or state of being in accordance and observance of laws that address colour. Colour is a phenomenon of visual light perception described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation in tandem with the understanding that colour is a vibrating wavelength interpreted through the brain within a complex neurobiological construction. What are the impacts, force, and agency of colours in public spaces? How do colours re(produce) socio-cultural power relationships in neoliberal societies? How do colours contribute to fixing and replicating social, national, and economic differences? In what ways do colours either implicitly or explicitly work as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion? It is argued that colour is a mechanism for the commodification of public spaces within neoliberal societies. By commodification, this thesis refers to the theory used to describe the process by which something that does not have an economic value is assigned a value and thus illustrating how market values can replace other social values. Colour has been controlled, manipulated, and regulated within public spaces by authoritative powers to psychologically influence human populations. Within this argument, a concern for the effects of colour in public spaces has predominately been overshadowed by a concern for capitalization. An understanding of the historical trajectory of the control of colour immersed with the perspicacity of how colour becomes a device of capitalism is essential. Case studies analysed draw attention to utilizations of colour by dominant forms of authority such as the colour elite nexus and government institutions. Colour is revealed to be a process and is therefore multitudinal and complex. The unravelling of these threads will provide a sharpened sense of colour and the implications of colour within public spaces.

Application of standard decompressive craniectomy in the treatment of traumatic brain injury

This article focuses on the processes that lead to awareness of our own emotions, which deserve particular attention in contemporary models of emotional consciousness. The subjective component of emotion, or emotional experience, was for a long time the most neglected aspect in the study of emotions although it already constituted the initial point of discussion in the famous William James still asked question : What is an emotion? More than a century later, contemporary theories debate about this heritage. We examine the successive historic contributions to the question of the determinants of our own emotional experience: from James-Lange bodily changes to cognitive appraisal theories, also relating the major role that the fundamental emotions theory attributed to facial expressions. Twenty years after the debate about primacy of cognition or emotion, both physiological-somatic and cognitive components are integrated in contemporary approaches to emotions. However, their respective degree of implication varies according to the different levels of emotional consciousness which are modelized. It is on the last level that present models focus, level that leads to consciousness of our emotional experience, benefiting from the contributions of cognitive neurosciences. Models differ according to the role devoted to neuronal substrates in determining emotional experience, but they converge on the specification of a last level of consciousness, which is the only one that allows the subject to be conscious of emotion as it is experienced (feeling) and that what he is experiencing is an emotion. Then, different models of emotional consciousness account for different varieties of emotion experience and also for various cases of << unconscious >> emotions, that is occurrence of emotion with a lack of awareness.

This chapter pursues a line of critical questioning concerning how we come to 'know' the embodied, discursive and biopolitical dimensions of mental health and illness in the context of physical cultures. It considers how the 'physical' within physical cultural studies (PCS) has been theorized with respect to questions of mental (ill) health in the context of an historical dualism of mind and body. The chapter explores how the broader cultural, economic and political context of the United Kingdom (UK) has positioned mind–body relations within mental health policy, research, advocacy and practice. The commonplace to read that 'exercise is medicine', and, the chapter argues that active embodiment has been subsumed within a new corporeal therapeutics aimed at ameliorating mental (ill) health. In the context of mental health, the phenomenon of lifestyle drift is also shaped by the contemporary intersection of two forms of expertise – exercise science and neuroscience.

I tell the history of how a theory–that humans have a hierarchy of needs–emerged in 1943 from larger conflicts over the study of the brain and the human being. A stoic, yet passionate neurologist Kurt Goldstein who fled Nazi Germany inspired a young psychologist, Abraham Maslow, with a forceful critique of materialist science; in doing so, hierarchies of brain became hierarchies of mind and self. The theory is widely used in business schools today and by more than few everyday American’s looking for greater success, deeper experiences of spirituality, and, in some cases, release from the sufferings of contemporary American life. This story is about how we make sense of our lives by the “real” established by science and how very much belief in something, whether formula or faith, helps us make sense of the reality of the “real” and thereby create the communities in which we live and strive.

Through displays that promote an intuitive understanding of the brain, this exhibition offers a compelling survey of current brain science.