Historical Perspectives in Understanding Brain and Behaviour

Earliest awareness of brain

  • Trepanning → 7000 yrs ago
  • Ancient Egyptians - 3000 BC
    • Medical research into the brain
    • Sensation contralateral side of the brain

Historical figures

  • Hippocrates → argued brain supports mind and behaviour
  • Plato → reason and perception in the brain
  • Aristotle → argued against Hippocrates, brain is for cooling the blood, sensations and control in the heart
  • Versalius → Anatomist, ventricles were essential for sensation and movement
  • Descartes → argued soul was separate from body
  • Galvani → physician, discovered electrical stimulation of a dead frog leads to reanimated limbs
  • Francis Gall → phrenology, argued that specific functions are localised to different areas of the brain
  • Jean Pierre Flourens → founder of experimental brain science, found no evidence of phrenoligists view
  • John Hughlings Jackson → important insights in cerebral function from studying brain-damaged patients
  • Phineas Gage → case study
  • Ferrier, Fritsch, Hitzig → used electrical stimulation to reveal localised fucnctions in the motor cortex with experimental animals
  • Charles Scott Sherrington → influential work on reflexex and general principles of nervous system
  • Penfield → Neurosurgeon, mapped out human motor and somatosensory corticles
  • Brenda Milner → patient HM case study, removal of temporal lobe for epilepsy, led to anterograde amnesia
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