CogNeuro Ch.1 - Historical Context

Thomas Willis

• coined neurology

• linked specific brain damage to specific behavioral deficits

Rene Descartes

• dualism

  • body including the brain has material properties

  • mind is nonmaterial

Gall (1758 - 1828)

• founder of phrenology (study of shape and size of skull)

Flourens (1794 - 1867)

• aggregate field theory

  • brain works as a unified whole, not as specialized functions localized in particular regions

John Jackson (1835-1911)

Localizationist View

• theory that specific mental functions behaviors, and emotions are mapped to distinct, localized region of the brain

Paul Broca (1824 - 1880)

• key region in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere (dominant hemisphere) responsible for speech production, language processing, and grammatical structure

• damage to this area causes Broca's aphasia, characterized by non-fluent, effortful speech while comprehension remains relatively intact.

Wernicke (1876)

• brain’s left hemisphere (posterior superior temporal gyrus) responsible for language comprehension and processing

• damage causes word salad

Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig

Korbinian Brodmann

Cytoarchitectonics

• the microscopic study of the cellular composition, structure, and arrangement of neurons in the central nervous system, particularly within the cerebral cortex.

• It defines brain regions based on neuronal size, density, and laminar organization (e.g., layers II-VI in neocortex), forming the basis for parcellation maps

Brodmann’s Area

• 52 distinct regions of the cerebral cortex

• These numbered areas map specific cortical regions to functional roles, such as motor control (Area 4), vision (Area 17), and language (Areas 44/45, 22)

Camillo Golgi

Syncytium

• a continuous mass of tissue that shares a common cytoplasm

Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Neuron Doctrine

• the concept that the nervous system is made up of individual cells

Direction of Electrical Transmission

• dendrites —> cell body —> axon

Purkinje

• described the first nerve cell in the NS

Helmholtz

• electrical current in the cell was the medium that was actually carrying information along the axon of a nerve cell.

Rationalism

all knowledge could be gained through the use of reason alone

• truth was intellectual, not sensory

Empiricism

All knowledge comes from sensory experience, that the brain begins life as a blank slate

Associationism

• Ebbinghaus: complex processes like memory could be measured and analyzed; mental processes as internal

• Thorndike: response that is followed by a reward would be stamped into the organism as a habitual response. No reward, response would disappear

• Watson: rejected Ebbinghaus - all talk of mental process which cannot be publicly observed should be avoided → behaviorism

Behaviorism

A learning theory in psychology focusing on observable behaviors, rather than mental processes, that are shaped by environmental interaction and conditioning.

It posits that all behaviors are acquired through interactions with the environment, specifically classical and operant conditioning, essentially viewing human behavior as a learned response to external stimuli.

Behaviorism - Watson

He could turn any baby into an adult that could do anything from tightrope to neurosurgery through learning.

• Albert experiment

Montreal procedure - Wilder Penfield

For treating epilepsy, he surgically destroyed neurons in the brain that produced seizures by stimulating various parts of the brain while the patient was awake

George Miller

he described an experiment revealing a limit to the amount of information we can keep in short-term memory: about seven items. Miller concluded that the brain, among other things, is an information processor and, breaking the bonds of behaviorism, he realized that the contents of the mind could be studied

Noam Chomsky

showed how the sequential predictability of speech follows from adherence to grammatical, not probabilistic, rules

Patricia Goldman-Rakic

she produced the first description of the circuitry of the prefrontal cortex and how it relates to working memory; performed first studies on the influence of dopamine in PFC