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.
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.