History of neuroscience
During the second half of the first millennium BC, the Ancient Greeks developed differing views on the function of the brain. However, due to the fact that Hippocratic doctors did not practice dissection, because the human body was considered sacred, Greek views of brain function were generally uninformed by anatomical study. It is said that it was the Pythagorean Alcmaeon of Croton (6th and 5th centuries BC) who first considered the brain to be the place where the mind was located. According to ancient authorities, "he believed the seat of sensations is in the brain. This contains the governing faculty. All the senses are connected in some way with the brain; consequently they are incapable of action if the brain is disturbed...the power of the brain to synthesize sensations makes it also the seat of thought: The storing up of perceptions gives memory and belief and when these are stabilized you get knowledge." In the 4th century BC Hippocrates, believed the brain to be the seat of intelligence (based, among others before him, on Alcmaeon's work). During the 4th century BC Aristotle thought that, while the heart was the seat of intelligence, the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. He reasoned that humans are more rational than the beasts because, among other reasons, they have a larger brain to cool their hot-bloodedness.
Nancy Kanwisher
Nancy Kanwisher has training in cognitive psychology, which is investigating how the mind works by observing its outward behavior. She discovered the "Fusiform face area", a region of the brain that recognizes fine distinctions between well-known objects (an example of this is facial recognition). She also discovered the "Parahippocampal place area", a region of the brain that recognizes environmental scenes. These two discoveries are now widely discussed in the cognitive field and provide a gold standard for clarity in search for primitives of human cognition. In her research, she uses a brain imaging method called Functional MRI that supports inferences about neural activity by indirectly measuring changes in blood flow. Functional MRI is a tool that can help explore functional specialization in different areas of the brain. Another area of Kanwisher's research uses behavioral methods and Transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the causal role of each brain region in cognition and also uses ECOG to study audition, language processing, and social perception. Nancy Kanwisher's lab work is so extensive that she received the opportunity to give a TED Talk entitled "A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind".