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.
Autotopagnosia
German Physiologist Hermann Munk (1839–1912) was the first to investigate the representation of our body's orientation. He discussed how multisensory imagery of our sensations allows for a vivid representation of the body in space, and how small legions on the sensorimotor cortex would lead to a loss of images for a specific part of the body. Accredited with finding Wernicke's Area, German neuro-pathologist Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) challenged Munk's theories, arguing that signals sent from different body parts are different from each other. The cortex was then thought to create a stable image of each body part in space by combining all of the varying incoming signals. The “master” signal integration was said to create an image of the overall body, known as “body consciousness”. Gaston Bonnier (1853–1922) was the first to recognize disorders of the bodies spatial schema as physiological rather than psychiatric. However his work has been consistently criticized due to several experimental discrepancies regarding his patients association of their body parts to their actual position. Colleagues Sir Gordon Holmes (1876–1965) and Henry Head (1861–1940) considered the image of the body as a specific representation, and noted this body schema as a model which postural changes were measured against. The two neurobiologists integrated the sensations from different sensors into a dynamic model of our actual posture, and studied patients lacking this postural schema.