Jean Pierre Flourens
Marie Jean Pierre Flourens (13 April 1794 – 6 December 1867), father of Gustave Flourens, was a French physiologist, the founder of experimental brain science and a pioneer in anesthesia. Through the study of ablations on animals, he was the first to prove that the mind was located in the brain, not the heart.
Restorative neurology
William James is credited for the idea of neuroplasticity based on the ideas in his two-volume book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890. Although it was not referred to neuroplasticity at the time, his concepts were clear. He was the first to recognize the brain as malleable, however his ideas were not widely accepted until the 1970s. Scientists had previously thought that a human adult brain was fixed, meaning that it was unable to generate new cells, and was essentially unchangeable. Children were the only group of individuals thought to have the ability to expand their knowledge and readily absorb new information. 
Several discoveries were made throughout the study of neuroplasticity. Eugenio Tanzi was responsible for the discovery of the neural articulations, known as synapses, and Ernesto Lugaro was later responsible for the association of neural plasticity with synaptic plasticity.
It wasn’t until tests on rhesus monkeys, beginning in the 1920s, proved evidence of the brain activity described by William James. Karl Lashley worked with adult rhesus monkeys and found neurons to travel in different pathways in response to the same stimuli. This led him to believe that neural plasticity was possible, and the brain of an adult rhesus monkey was able to incorporate change and the ability to remodel itself. Despite these discoveries, the idea was largely unaccepted. Another study on rhesus monkeys in 1970, led by Michael Merzenich, researched sensory motor neurons in response to severed nerve endings in the hands of Rhesus monkeys. They discovered that the brain was able to rewire itself so that the monkeys could process signals from other parts of the hand where they could still feel. “Plasticity” was made popular by Livingstons work in 1966. He challenged the consensus that the brain only develops during a critical period in early childhood. He showed how many places of the brain continue to display plasticity through adulthood.