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.
Exploding head syndrome
Case reports of EHS have been published since at least 1876, which Silas Weir Mitchell described as "sensory discharges" in a patient. However, it has been suggested that the earliest written account of EHS was described in the biography of the French philosopher René Descartes in 1691. The phrase "snapping of the brain" was coined in 1920 by the British physician and psychiatrist Robert Armstrong-Jones. A detailed description of the syndrome and the name "exploding head syndrome" was given by British neurologist John M. S. Pearce in 1989. More recently, Peter Goadsby and Brian Sharpless have proposed renaming EHS "episodic cranial sensory shock" as it describes the symptoms more accurately (including the non-auditory elements) and better attributes to Mitchell.