Who first identified the brain as the location of the mind?
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.
Cognitive neuroscience
Philosophers have always been interested in the mind: "the idea that explaining a phenomenon involves understanding the mechanism responsible for it has deep roots in the History of Philosophy from atomic theories in 5th century B.C. to its rebirth in the 17th and 18th century in the works of Galileo, Descartes, and Boyle. Among others, it’s Descartes’ idea that machines humans build could work as models of scientific explanation."
For example, Aristotle thought the brain was the body’s cooling system and the capacity for intelligence was located in the heart. It has been suggested that the first person to believe otherwise was the Roman physician Galen in the second century AD, who declared that the brain was the source of mental activity, although this has also been accredited to Alcmaeon. However, Galen believed that personality and emotion were not generated by the brain, but rather by other organs. Andreas Vesalius, an anatomist and physician, was the first to believe that the brain and the nervous system are the center of the mind and emotion. Psychology, a major contributing field to cognitive neuroscience, emerged from philosophical reasoning about the mind.
Cognitive psychology
Philosophically, ruminations of the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the ancient Greeks. In 387 BCE, Plato is known to have suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes. In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans are born with innate ideas, and forwarded the idea of mind-body dualism, which would come to be known as substance dualism (essentially the idea that the mind and the body are two separate substances). From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century regarding whether human thought was solely experiential (empiricism), or included innate knowledge (nativism). Some of those involved in this debate included George Berkeley and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on the side of nativism.
Charles Estienne
Éstienne, though from a family whose classical taste was their principal glory, did not betray the same servile imitation of the Galenian anatomy as his contemporary, Jacques Dubois. He appears to have been the first to detect valves in the orifice of the hepatic veins. He was ignorant, however, of the researches of the Italian anatomists; and his description of the brain is inferior to that given sixty years before by Alessandro Achillini. His comparison of the cerebral cavities to the human ear has persuaded F. Portal that he knew the inferior cornua, the hippocampus and its prolongations; but this is no reason for giving him that honour to the detriment of the reputation of Achillini, to whom, so far as historical testimony goes, the first knowledge of this fact is due.
John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)
John O'Keefe, (born November 18, 1939) is an American-British neuroscientist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. In 2014, he received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience "for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition", together with Brenda Milner and Marcus Raichle. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.
François Leuret
Leuret is remembered for his work in comparative anatomy of the brain with Louis Gratiolet. The two men did extensive topographic mapping of the folds and fissures of the cerebral cortex. Leuret coined the name "fissure of Rolando" after Italian anatomist Luigi Rolando (1773–1831) for what is now known as the central sulcus of the brain.
Giovanni Maria Lancisi
Lancisi described the corpus callosum as the "seat of the soul, which imagines, deliberates and judges." His "Dissertatio Physiognomica" provided the supporting argument in 1713. He opposed alternative locations of the soul as hypothesized by others, such as the centrum ovale, by Andreas Vesalius, and the pineal gland, by René Descartes. He hypothesized that the Longitudinal striae (later named in his honor as the "striae lancisi" or "nerves of Lancisi") were the conduit between the anterior location of the soul, and the posterior location of sensory organ functions, both within the corpus callosum.
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015) was Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex, as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper, on the somatosensory cortex, used columnar organization as their basis.
Human brain
In the fifth century BC, Alcmaeon of Croton in Magna Grecia, first considered the brain to be the seat of the mind. Also in the fifth century BC in Athens, the unknown author of "On the Sacred Disease", a medical treatise which is part of the Hippocratic Corpus and traditionally attributed to Hippocrates, believed the brain to be the seat of intelligence. Aristotle, in his biology initially believed the heart to be the seat of intelligence, and saw the brain as 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. Aristotle did describe the meninges and distinguished between the cerebrum and cerebellum. Herophilus of Chalcedon in the fourth and third centuries BC distinguished the cerebrum and the cerebellum, and provided the first clear description of the ventricles; and with Erasistratus of Ceos experimented on living brains. Their works are now mostly lost, and we know about their achievements due mostly to secondary sources. Some of their discoveries had to be re-discovered a millennium after their deaths. Anatomist physician Galen in the second century AD, during the time of the Roman Empire, dissected the brains of sheep, monkeys, dogs, and pigs. He concluded that, as the cerebellum was denser than the brain, it must control the muscles, while as the cerebrum was soft, it must be where the senses were processed. Galen further theorized that the brain functioned by movement of animal spirits through the ventricles.
J. Randall Brown
John Randall Brown (October 28, 1851 – July 3, 1926) was an American mentalist of the Victorian era, and was one of the first nationally popular mentalists of his age. By some accounts, Brown was the first to publicly perform a mind-reading act in the United States, in 1873. He was born in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Neurophysiology
In 177 Galen theorized that human thought occurred in the brain, as opposed to the heart as Aristotle had theorized. The optic chiasm, which is crucial to the visual system, was discovered around 100 C.E. by Marinus. Circa 1000, Al-Zahrawi, living in Iberia, began to write about different surgical treatments for neurological disorders. In 1216, the first anatomy textbook in Europe, which included a description of the brain, was written by Mondino de Luzzi. In 1402, St Mary of Bethlehem Hospital (later known as Bedlam in Britain) was the first hospital used exclusively for the mentally ill.
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".
John Eccles (neurophysiologist)
In "The Understanding of the Brain" (1973), Eccles summarises his philosophy: "Now before discussing brain function in detail I will at the beginning give an account of my philosophical position on the so-called 'brain-mind problem' so that you will be able to relate the experimental evidence to this philosophical position. I have written at length on this philosophy in my book "Facing Reality". In Fig. 6-1 you will be able to see that I fully accept the recent philosophical achievements of Sir Karl Popper with his concept of three worlds. I was a dualist, now I am a trialist! Cartesian dualism has become unfashionable with many people. They embrace monism to escape the enigma of brain-mind interaction with its perplexing problems. But Sir Karl Popper and I are interactionists, and what is more, "trialist interactionists"! The three worlds are very easily defined. I believe that in the classification of Fig. 6-1 there is nothing left out. It takes care of everything that is in existence and in our experience. All can be classified in one or other of the categories enumerated under Worlds 1, 2 and 3.
Mitchell Point (Antarctica)
Mitchell Point () is a point at the south side of the entrance to Hill Bay on the east coast of Brabant Island, in the Palmer Archipelago, Antarctica. It was photographed by Hunting Aerosurveys Ltd in 1956–57, and was mapped from these photos in 1959. The point was named by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee for American surgeon Silas W. Mitchell, the founder of neurology in the United States.
Human brain
The Edwin Smith Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical treatise written in the 17th century BC, contains the earliest recorded reference to the brain. The hieroglyph for brain, occurring eight times in this papyrus, describes the symptoms, diagnosis, and prognosis of two traumatic injuries to the head. The papyrus mentions the external surface of the brain, the effects of injury (including seizures and aphasia), the meninges, and cerebrospinal fluid.
Gottlieb Burckhardt
In 1876 he became a Privatdozent at the University of Bern where he lectured on nervous and mental diseases. This marks a highly productive period in his career as he became a regular contributor to several medical publications including the Swiss periodical "Korrespondenzblatt für Schweizer Ärtze" and produced articles on a variety of psychiatric and neurological topics. In 1877 he published a historical treatment of psychiatric and psychological theories of the functional regions of the brain. In this article he proposed that there were "cortical dispersion centres" which were "rooted in physiology and anatomy in the brain" and that these played a crucial role in the development of mental illness. Burckhardt drew inspiration for his hypothesis from recent advances which had shown the localisation of language faculties in the brain and he believed that mental diseases were also traceable to specific cortical centres. In the application of internal medicine to psychiatry, his research activities extended to an exploration of the relationship between mental illness and bodily temperature, blood pressure and pulse. In 1881 he published on the relationship between cerebral blood flow and oxygen consumption and posited a connection between cerebral oxygen deprivation, pathological brain circulation and mental illness. While at Bern he also successfully submitted articles on the histological preparation of brain cells, sensory aphasia ("word deafness"), the anatomy of the brain and cerebral localisation and forensic psychiatry. From 1881 until his departure from the Waldau Clinic in 1882, Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia in 1908, served as his medical intern.
Albert Einstein's brain
In the 1980s, University of California, Berkeley professor Marian Diamond received four sections of the cortical association regions of the superior prefrontal and inferior parietal lobes in the right and left hemispheres of Albert Einstein's brain from Thomas Harvey. In 1984, Marian Diamond and her associates were the first ever to publish research on the brain of Albert Einstein. She compared the ratio of glial cells in Einstein's brain with that of the preserved brains of 11 other males. (Glial cells provide support and nutrition in the brain, form myelin, and participate in signal transmission, and are the other integral component of the brain, besides the neurons.) Dr. Diamond's laboratory made thin sections of Einstein's brain, each 6 micrometers thick. They then used a microscope to count the cells. Einstein's brain had more glial cells relative to neurons in all areas studied, but only in the left inferior parietal area was the difference statistically significant. This area is part of the association cortex, regions of the brain responsible for incorporating and synthesizing information from multiple other brain regions. A stimulating environment can increase the proportion of glial cells and the high ratio could possibly result from Einstein's life studying stimulating scientific problems.
Sweet Dreams (book)
Dennett reposes the question of consciousness addressed in his 1991 book "Consciousness Explained". In "Consciousness Explained", Dennett established what he called the "multiple drafts model" of consciousness, which suggested that there was no singular space in the conscious mind. In other words, there is no special location in the brain that can be seen as the qualia-containing "consciousness module". Instead, he states that consciousness is smeared throughout the brain. He extends the model by creating a similar figure that he calls "Fame in the Brain" and suggests that the mind acts, to some degree, as an echo chamber, as well as the "bundle of semi-independent agencies" that he suggested in "Consciousness Explained".
Extrastriate body area
As published in the article, “A Cortical Area Selective for Visual Processing of the Human Body,” researcher, Paul E. Downing, Yuhong Jiang, Miles Shuman and Nancy Kanwisher, first discovered the EBA in 2001. The experiment originally intended to find out what area of the brain dealt with the human form and recognition of body parts, as the face had been mapped to a specific area of the brain (Fusiform Face Area, FFA) by Nancy Kanwisher in 1997. What the experiment found was a specific area of the lateral occipitotemporal cortex that responds selectively to visual images of human bodies and body parts, with the exception of faces.
Eric Knudsen
In 1978, Knudsen and Konishi presented the discovery of an auditory map of space in the midbrain of the barn owl. This discovery was groundbreaking because it unearthed the first non-somatotopic space map in the brain. The map was found in the owl’s midbrain, in the lateral and anterior mesencephalicus lateralis dorsalis (MLD), a structure now referred to as the inferior colliculus. Unlike most sound-localization maps, this map was found to be two-dimensional, with units arranged spatially to represent both the vertical and horizontal location of sound. Knudsen and Konishi discovered that units in this structure respond preferentially to sounds originating in a particular region in space.
In the 1978 paper, elevation and azimuth (location in the horizontal plane) were shown to be the two coordinates of the map. Using a speaker set on a rotatable hemispherical track, Knudsen and Konishi presented owls with auditory stimulus from various locations in space and recorded the resulting neuronal activity. They found that neurons in this part of the MLD were organized according to the location of their receptive field, with azimuth varying along the horizontal plane of the space map and elevation varying vertically. 
Knudsen followed this discovery with research into specific sound localization mechanisms. Two main auditory cues used by the barn owl to localize sound are interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural intensity difference (IID). The owl’s ears are asymmetric, with the right ear’s opening being directed higher than that of the left. This asymmetry allows the barn owl to determine the elevation of a sound by comparing sound levels between its two ears. Interaural time differences provide the owl with information regarding a sound’s azimuth; sound will reach the ear closer to the sound source before reaching the farther ear, and this time difference can be detected and interpreted as an azimuthal direction. At low frequencies, the wavelength of a sound is wider than the owl's facial ruff, and the ruff does not affect detection of azimuth. At high frequencies, the ruff plays a role in reflecting sound for heightened sensitivity to vertical elevation. Therefore, with wide-band noise, containing both high and low frequencies, the owl could use interaural spectrum difference to obtain information about both azimuth and elevation. In 1979, Knudsen and Konishi showed that the barn owl uses interaural spectrum information in sound localization. They presented owls with both wide-bandwidth noise and pure tones. The birds were able to successfully locate pure tones (since they could still gather information from IID and ITD), but their error rate was much lower when localizing wide-bandwidth noise. This indicates that the birds utilize interaural spectrum differences to improve their accuracy.
Clinical neuropsychology
The relationship between human behavior and the brain is the focus of clinical neuropsychology as defined by Meir in 1974. There are two subdivisions of clinical neuropsychology which draw much focus; organic and environmental natures. Ralph M. Reitan, Arthur L. Benton, and A. R. Luria are all past neuropsychologists whom believed and studied the organic nature of clinical neuropsychology. On the other side, environmental nature of clinical neuropsychology did not appear until more recently and is characterized by treatments such as behavior therapy. The relationship between physical brain abnormalities and the presentation of psychopathology is not completely understood, but this is one of the questions which clinical neuropsychologists hope to answer in time. In 1861 the debate over human potentiality versus localization began. The two sides argued over how human behavior presented in the brain. Paul Broca postulated that cognitive problems could be caused by physical damage to specific parts of the brain based on a case study of his in which he found a lesion on the brain of a deceased patient who had presented the symptom of being unable to speak, that portion of the brain is now known as Broca's Area. In 1874 Carl Wernicke also made a similar observation in a case study involving a patient with a brain lesion whom was unable to comprehend speech, the part of the brain with the lesion is now deemed Wernicke's Area. Both Broca and Wernicke believed and studied the theory of localization. On the other hand, equal potentiality theorists believed that brain function was not based on a single piece of the brain but rather on the brain as a whole. Marie J. P Flourens conducted animal studies in which he found that the amount of brain tissue damaged directly affected the amount that behavior ability was altered or damaged. Kurt Goldstein observed the same idea as Flourens except in veterans who had fought in World War I. In the end, despite all of the disagreement, neither theory completely explains the human brains complexity. Thomas Hughlings Jackson created a theory which was thought to be a possible solution. Jackson believed that both potentiality and localization were in part correct and that behavior was made by multiple parts of the brain working collectively to cause behaviors, and Luria (1966-1973) furthered Jackson's theory.
Lobotomy
Before the 1930s, individual doctors had infrequently experimented with novel surgical operations on the brains of those deemed insane. Most notably in 1888, the Swiss psychiatrist, Gottlieb Burckhardt, initiated what is commonly considered the first systematic attempt at modern human psychosurgery. He operated on six chronic patients under his care at the Swiss Préfargier Asylum, removing sections of their cerebral cortex. Burckhardt's decision to operate was informed by three pervasive views on the nature of mental illness and its relationship to the brain. First, the belief that mental illness was organic in nature, and reflected an underlying brain pathology; next, that the nervous system was organized according to an associationist model comprising an input or afferent system (a sensory center), a connecting system where information processing took place (an association center), and an output or efferent system (a motor center); and, finally, a modular conception of the brain whereby discrete mental faculties were connected to specific regions of the brain. Burckhardt's hypothesis was that by deliberately creating lesions in regions of the brain identified as association centers a transformation in behavior might ensue. According to his model, those mentally ill might experience "excitations abnormal in quality, quantity and intensity" in the sensory regions of the brain and this abnormal stimulation would then be transmitted to the motor regions giving rise to mental pathology. He reasoned, however, that removing material from either of the sensory or motor zones could give rise to "grave functional disturbance". Instead, by targeting the association centers and creating a "ditch" around the motor region of the temporal lobe, he hoped to break their lines of communication and thus alleviate both mental symptoms and the experience of mental distress.
Alexander Bain
Alexander Bain (11 June 1818 – 18 September 1903) was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist in the British school of empiricism and a prominent and innovative figure in the fields of psychology, linguistics, logic, moral philosophy and education reform. He founded "Mind", the first ever journal of psychology and analytical philosophy, and was the leading figure in establishing and applying the scientific method to psychology. Bain was the inaugural Regius Chair in Logic and Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, where he also held Professorships in Moral Philosophy and English Literature and was twice elected Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen.
Cerebellum
Even the earliest anatomists were able to recognize the cerebellum by its distinctive appearance. Aristotle and Herophilus (quoted in Galen) called it the παρεγκεφαλίς ("paregkephalis"), as opposed to the ἐγκέφαλος ("egkephalos") or brain proper. Galen's extensive description is the earliest that survives. He speculated that the cerebellum was the source of motor nerves.
Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
The "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung" (KWI for Brain Research) was founded in Berlin in 1914, making it one of the oldest institutes of the "Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science", itself founded in 1911. It was based on the Neurologische Zentralstation (Neurological Center), a private research institute established by Oskar Vogt in 1898 and run together with his wife Cécile Vogt-Mugnier, also an accomplished brain researcher.
Head
Proponents of identism believe that the mind is identical to the brain. Philosopher John Searle asserts his identist beliefs, stating "the brain is the only thing in the human head". Similarly, Dr. Henry Bennet-Clark has stated that the head encloses billions of "miniagents and microagents (with no single Boss)".
Anatomy
Some of the most striking advances in early anatomy and physiology took place in Hellenistic Alexandria. Two of the most famous anatomists and physiologists of the third century were Herophilus and Erasistratus. These two physicians helped pioneer human dissection for medical research. They also conducted vivisections on the cadavers of condemned criminals, which was considered taboo until the Renaissance—Herophilus was recognized as the first person to perform systematic dissections. Herophilus became known for his anatomical works making impressing contributions to many branches of anatomy and many other aspects of medicine. Some of the works included classifying the system of the pulse, the discovery that human arteries had thicker walls then veins, and that the atria were parts of the heart. Herophilus's knowledge of the human body has provided vital input towards understanding the brain, eye, liver, reproductive organs and nervous system, and characterizing the course of disease. Erasistratus accurately described the structure of the brain, including the cavities and membranes, and made a distinction between its cerebrum and cerebellum During his study in Alexandria, Erasistratus was particularly concerned with studies of the circulatory and nervous systems. He was able to distinguish the sensory and the motor nerves in the human body and believed that air entered the lungs and heart, which was then carried throughout the body. His distinction between the arteries and veins—the arteries carrying the air through the body, while the veins carried the blood from the heart was a great anatomical discovery. Erasistratus was also responsible for naming and describing the function of the epiglottis and the valves of the heart, including the tricuspid. During the third century, Greek physicians were able to differentiate nerves from blood vessels and tendons and to realize that the nerves convey neural impulses. It was Herophilus who made the point that damage to motor nerves induced paralysis. Herophilus named the meninges and ventricles in the brain, appreciated the division between cerebellum and cerebrum and recognized that the brain was the "seat of intellect" and not a "cooling chamber" as propounded by Aristotle Herophilus is also credited with describing the optic, oculomotor, motor division of the trigeminal, facial, vestibulocochlear and hypoglossal nerves.
Franz Joseph Gall
Franz Josef Gall (; 9 March 175822 August 1828) was a neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain.
John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)
O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky discovered place cells by systematically analyzing the environmental factors influencing the firing properties of individual hippocampal neurons. His many publications on place cells have been highly cited. In addition, he published an influential book with Lynn Nadel, proposing the functional role of the hippocampus as a cognitive map for spatial memory function. In extensions of his work, place cells have been analyzed experimentally or simulated in models in hundreds of papers.
Heart
Many classical philosophers and scientists, including Aristotle, considered the heart the seat of thought, reason, or emotion, often disregarding the brain as contributing to those functions. The identification of the heart as the seat of emotions in particular is due to the Roman physician Galen, who also located the seat of the passions in the liver, and the seat of reason in the brain.
Human brain
René Descartes proposed the theory of dualism to tackle the issue of the brain's relation to the mind. He suggested that the pineal gland was where the mind interacted with the body after recording the brain mechanisms responsible for circulating cerebrospinal fluid. This dualism likely provided impetus for later anatomists to further explore the relationship between the anatomical and functional aspects of brain anatomy.
Body schema
Henry Head, an English neurologist who conducted pioneering work into the somatosensory system and sensory nerves, together with British neurologist Gordon Morgan Holmes, first described the concept in 1911. The concept was first termed "postural schema" to describe the disordered spatial representation of patients following damage to the parietal lobe of the brain. Head and Holmes discussed two schemas (or schemata): one body schema for the registration of posture or movement and another body schema for the localization of stimulated locations on the body surface. "Body schema" became the term used for the "organized models of ourselves". The term and definition first suggested by Head and Holmes has endured nearly a century of research with clarifications as more has become known about neuroscience and the brain.
Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
In 1927, Vogt gave a preliminary report on his findings in Moscow, concluding from his histological observations that Lenin must have been an athlete in associative thinking ("Assoziationsathlet") - a conclusion deemed farfetched by some of his neurologist colleagues and adversaries. Lenin's brain was, for a time, on display in the Lenin Mausoleum and now rests at Moscow's Brain Institute.
A History of the Mind
Richard Webster, writing in "Why Freud Was Wrong" (1995), called "A History of the Mind" one of the most interesting attempts to solve the mind–body problem. He suggested that Humphrey succeeded in eliminating mind-body dualism entirely, although he noted that details of Humphrey's hypothesis remain speculative and open to criticism and that the hypothesis was rejected by McGinn. The paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, writing with Blake Edgar in "From Lucy to Language" (1996), noted that Humphrey's hypothesis about consciousness places a different emphasis on feeling and thinking than the hypothesis about consciousness put forward by Dennett in "Consciousness Explained" (1991).
Andrew Brook
"Kant and the Mind" was first published in 1994 by Cambridge University Press: in 1996 a paperback edition appeared. As Brook notes in the preface, Kant and the Mind was written for two audiences. First, cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, and students of cognition. Second, Kant scholars. The book thus has two parts: the first four chapters provide an overview of Kant's model of the mind for general audiences. The second part, written primarily for Kant scholars, attempts to justify the reading given in the first four chapters. Brook emphasizes in the book that Kant had something to offer contemporary psychology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. he writes, "I think that the discoveries he made about the mind not only were a contribution in their time, but continue to be important now."
Brook attributes the following discoveries to Kant: 1) the mind has the ability to synthesize a single coherent representation of self and the world. 2) The mind has a unity that is necessary to produce representation. 3) The mind's awareness of itself has unique features stemming from the semantic apparatus that it uses to achieve this awareness. He also suggests that three of Kant's insights have been adopted by cognitive science: the transcendental method (inference to the best explanation), that experience requires both concepts and percepts; and his general picture of the mind as a system of concept-using functions for manipulating representations. He explains that Kant distrusted introspection as a means of revealing the structure of the mind, yet also had deep reservations about Cartesian "a priori" arguments. The theory of mind that Brook finds in Kant is not based on either approach, but instead explores what powers the mind must have in order to have experiences and representations that it has.
Colin McGinn
Owen Flanagan introduced the term "new mysterians" in 1991 (named after Question Mark & the Mysterians, a 1960s band) to describe McGinn's position and that of Thomas Nagel, first described in Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" (1974). McGinn introduced his position in "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" ("Mind", 1989), and in "The Problem of Consciousness" (1991), arguing that the human mind is incapable of comprehending itself entirely. Mark Rowlands writes that the 1989 article was largely responsible for reviving the debate about phenomenal consciousness, or the nature of experience. McGinn argued in the paper for the idea of cognitive closure:
A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T), if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M's disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T). Conceiving minds come in different kinds, equipped with varying powers and limitations, biases and blindspots, so that properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us may be closed to the monkey. ... But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind.
Homo Sapiens 1900
After Lenin's death in 1924, German neurologist Oskar Vogt was requested to study Lenin's brain. He established the Brain Research Institute in Moscow. One of its tasks was to collect all the brains of deceased, highly talented/intellectual Soviet individuals, with Lenin as its first specimen. By safeguarding the brains of the best and brightest for research purposes, these scientists hoped to map out and gain a full understanding of the brain.
Mental image
The concept of "the mind's eye" first appeared in English in Chaucer's (c. 1387) Man of Law's Tale in his "Canterbury Tales", where he tells us that one of the three men dwelling in a castle was blind, and could only see with "the eyes of his mind"; namely, those eyes "with which all men see after they have become blind". The phrase remained rarely used and the OED incorrectly ascribes it to Shakespeare, as the first time the literally introspective phrase ‘the mind's eye’ is used in English was in Hamlet. As an example of introspection, it demonstrates that the internal life of the mind rarely came into focus in literature until the introspective realism movement in the 19th century.
Gottlieb Burckhardt
Johann Gottlieb Burckhardt (24 December 1836 – 6 February 1907) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the medical director of a small mental hospital in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. He is commonly regarded as having performed the first modern psychosurgical operation. Born in Basel, Switzerland, he trained as doctor at the Universities of Basel, Göttingen and Berlin, receiving his medical doctorate in 1860. In the same year he took up a teaching post in the University of Basel and established a private practice in his hometown. He married in 1863 but the following year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and gave up his practice and relocated to a region south of the Pyrennes in search of a cure. By 1866 he had made a full recovery and returned to Basel with the intention of devoting himself to the study of nervous diseases and their treatment. In 1875, he attained a post at the Waldau University Psychiatric Clinic in Bern and from 1876 he lectured on mental diseases at the University of Bern. Beginning in this period, he published widely on his psychiatric and neurological research findings in the medical press developing the thesis that mental illnesses had their origins in specific regions of the brain.
How to Create a Mind
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a non-fiction book about brains, both human and artificial, by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. First published in hardcover on November 13, 2012 by Viking Press it became a New York Times Best Seller. It has received attention from "The Washington Post", "The New York Times" and "The New Yorker".
Neuroscience
The view that the heart was the source of consciousness was not challenged until the time of the Greek physician Hippocrates. He believed that the brain was not only involved with sensation—since most specialized organs (e.g., eyes, ears, tongue) are located in the head near the brain—but was also the seat of intelligence. Plato also speculated that the brain was the seat of the rational part of the soul. Aristotle, however, believed the heart was the center of intelligence and that the brain regulated the amount of heat from the heart. This view was generally accepted until the Roman physician Galen, a follower of Hippocrates and physician to Roman gladiators, observed that his patients lost their mental faculties when they had sustained damage to their brains.
Neuropsychology
Towards the late 19th century, the belief that the size of ones skull could determine their level of intelligence was discarded as science and medicine moved forward. A physician by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud expanded upon the ideas of Gall and took a closer look at the idea of distinct cortical regions of the brain each having their own independent function. Bouillaud was specifically interested in speech and wrote many publications on the anterior region of the brain being responsible for carrying out the act of ones speech, a discovery that had stemmed from the research of Gall. He was also one of the first to use larger samples for research although it took many years for that method to be accepted. By looking at over a hundred different case studies, Bouillaud came to discover that it was through different areas of the brain that speech is completed and understood. By observing people with brain damage, his theory was made more concrete. Bouillaud, along with many other pioneers of the time made great advances within the field of neurology, especially when it came to localization of function. There are many arguable debates as to who deserves the most credit for such discoveries, and often, people remain unmentioned, but Paul Broca is perhaps one of the most famous and well known contributors to neuropsychology – often referred to as "the father" of the discipline.
History of neuroscience
From the ancient Egyptian mummifications to 18th century scientific research on "globules" and neurons, there is evidence of neuroscience practice throughout the early periods of history. The early civilizations lacked adequate means to obtain knowledge about the human brain. Their assumptions about the inner workings of the mind, therefore, were not accurate. Early views on the function of the brain regarded it to be a form of "cranial stuffing" of sorts. In ancient Egypt, from the late Middle Kingdom onwards, in preparation for mummification, the brain was regularly removed, for it was the heart that was assumed to be the seat of intelligence. According to Herodotus, during the first step of mummification: "The most perfect practice is to extract as much of the brain as possible with an iron hook, and what the hook cannot reach is mixed with drugs." Over the next five thousand years, this view came to be reversed; the brain is now known to be the seat of intelligence, although colloquial variations of the former remain as in "memorizing something by heart".
Neuropsychology
It was in the mid-17th century that another major contributor to the field of neuropsychology emerged. Thomas Willis studied at Oxford University and took a physiological approach to the brain and behavior. It was Willis who coined the words 'hemisphere' and 'lobe' when referring to the brain. He was one of the earliest to use the words 'neurology' and 'psychology'. Rejecting the idea that humans were the only beings capable of rational thought, Willis looked at specialized structures of the brain. He theorized that higher structures accounted for complex functions, whereas lower structures were responsible for functions similar to those seen in other animals, consisting mostly of reactions and automatic responses. He was particularly interested in people who suffered from manic disorders and hysteria. His research constituted some of the first times that psychiatry and neurology came together to study individuals. Through his in-depth study of the brain and behavior, Willis concluded that automated responses such as breathing, heartbeats and other various motor activities were carried out within the lower region of the brain. Although much of his work has been made obsolete, his ideas presented the brain as more complex than previously imagined, and led the way for future pioneers to understand and build upon his theories, especially when it came to looking at disorders and dysfunctions in the brain.
The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic
On a routine visit to check on his investments in the Tuberculosis Clinic, philanthropist Henry Phipps asked Dr. William Welch if there were any other departments that needed assistance. A book called "A Mind That Found Itself" by Clifford Whittingham Beers inspired Welch to request an investment so Johns Hopkins could become a leader in psychiatry. Phipps agreed to donate $1.5 million to start the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. A man named Adolf Meyer, a prominent professor of psychiatry at Cornell University and the first ever psychobiologist, helped publish "A Mind That Found Itself" and was one of the best in the field of psychiatry, so Welch recruited Meyer to become the head of the new department. Meyer became the head of the department in 1909 and oversaw the development of both the department and the building that would house the clinic for the next few decades. After several years of construction, the clinic finally opened on April 16, 1913.
Cognitive neuroscience
The localizationist view was concerned with mental abilities being localized to specific areas of the brain rather than on what the characteristics of the abilities were and how to measure them. Studies performed in Europe, such as those of John Hughlings Jackson, supported this view. Jackson studied patients with brain damage, particularly those with epilepsy. He discovered that the epileptic patients often made the same clonic and tonic movements of muscle during their seizures, leading Jackson to believe that they must be occurring in the same place every time. Jackson proposed that specific functions were localized to specific areas of the brain, which was critical to future understanding of the brain lobes.
John Hughlings Jackson
In Otfrid Foerster's research on the motor cortex, he cites exclusively Hughlings Jackson for the initial discovery (although without evidence) of the brain as the spring of neurological motor signalling.
Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo was a physiologist as well as an anatomist, studying the function of the human body as well as examining and recording its structure. He dissected and drew the human skull and cross-sections of the brain, transversal, sagittal, and frontal. These drawings may be linked to a search for the "sensus communis", the locus of the human senses, which, by Medieval tradition, was located at the exact physical center of the skull.
Creative visualization
The concept of "the mind's eye" first appeared in English in Chaucer's (c.1387) Man of Law's Tale in his Canterbury Tales, where he tells us that one of the three men dwelling in a castle was blind, and could only see with "the eyes of his mind"—namely, those eyes "with which all men see after they have become blind.".
J. J. C. Smart
Regarding the philosophy of mind, Smart was a physicalist. In the 1950s, he was also one of the originators, with Ullin Place, of the mind–brain identity theory, which claims that particular states of mind are identical with particular states of the brain. Initially, this view was dubbed "Australian materialism" by its detractors, in reference to the stereotype of Australians as down-to-earth and unsophisticated.
Luigi Rolando
Luigi Rolando (16 June 1773, Turin – 20 April 1831, Turin) was an Italian anatomist known for his pioneering research in brain localization of function.
Human brain
Paul Broca associated regions of the brain with specific functions, in particular language in Broca's area, following work on brain-damaged patients. John Hughlings Jackson described the function of the motor cortex by watching the progression of epileptic seizures through the body. Carl Wernicke described a region associated with language comprehension and production. Korbinian Brodmann divided regions of the brain based on the appearance of cells. By 1950, Sherrington, Papez, and MacLean had identified many of the brainstem and limbic system functions. The capacity of the brain to re-organise and change with age, and a recognised critical development period, were attributed to neuroplasticity, pioneered by Margaret Kennard, who experimented on monkeys during the 1930-40s.
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.
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.
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.
Oskar Vogt
In 1925 Vogt accepted an invitation to Moscow where he was assigned the establishment of an institute for brain research under the auspices of the health ministry in Moscow. In 1945 Lenin's brain was still in the Institute of Berlin. According to claims of two Belgians, L. Van Bogaert and A. Dewulf, the Soviets carried out a military operation specifically to retrieve the brain before the Americans obtained it, and succeeded in doing so. It was, for a time, put on display in the Lenin Mausoleum. The brain is now at Moscow's Institute.
Cognitive psychology
With the philosophical debate continuing, the mid to late 19th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline. Two discoveries that would later play substantial roles in cognitive psychology were Paul Broca's discovery of the area of the brain largely responsible for language production, and Carl Wernicke's discovery of an area thought to be mostly responsible for comprehension of language. Both areas were subsequently formally named for their founders and disruptions of an individual's language production or comprehension due to trauma or malformation in these areas have come to commonly be known as Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia.
Brain
The invention of electronic computers in the 1940s, along with the development of mathematical information theory, led to a realization that brains can potentially be understood as information processing systems. This concept formed the basis of the field of cybernetics, and eventually gave rise to the field now known as computational neuroscience. The earliest attempts at cybernetics were somewhat crude in that they treated the brain as essentially a digital computer in disguise, as for example in John von Neumann's 1958 book, "The Computer and the Brain". Over the years, though, accumulating information about the electrical responses of brain cells recorded from behaving animals has steadily moved theoretical concepts in the direction of increasing realism.
Thought identification
Psychologist John-Dylan Haynes experienced breakthroughs in brain imaging research in 2006 by using fMRI. This research included new findings on visual object recognition, tracking dynamic mental processes, lie detecting, and decoding unconscious processing. The combination of these four discoveries revealed such a significant amount of information about an individual's thoughts that Haynes termed it "brain reading".
Psychophysical parallelism
In his 1925 book "The Mind and its Place in Nature", C. D. Broad maintains that parallelism is, "The assertion is that to every particular change in the mind there corresponds a certain change in the brain which this mind animates, and that to every change in the brain there corresponds a certain change in the mind which animates this brain."
Franciscus Sylvius
He researched the structure of the brain and was credited as the discoverer of the cleft in the brain known as Sylvian fissure by Caspar Bartholin in his 1641 book "Casp. Bartolini Institutiones Anatomicae" In this book, it is noted that in the preface that “We can all measure the nobility of Sylvius’s brain and talent by the marvelous, new structure of the brain” And also, “In the new images of the brain, the engraver followed the design and scalpel of the most thorough Franciscus Sylvius, to whom we owe, in this part, everything that the brain has the most, or the most wonderful of”
Heterarchy
The concept of heterarchy was first employed in a modern context by Warren McCulloch in 1945. As Carole L. Crumley has summarised, "[h]e examined alternative cognitive structure(s), the collective organization of which he termed heterarchy. He demonstrated that the human brain, while reasonably orderly was not organized hierarchically. This understanding revolutionized the neural study of the brain and solved major problems in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer design."
Dual consciousness
In 1978, Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph DeLoux discovered a unique phenomenon among split-brain patients who were asked to perform a simultaneous concept task. The patient was shown 2 pictures: of a house in the winter time and of a chicken's claw. The pictures were positioned so they would exclusively be seen in only one visual field of the brain (the winter house was positioned so it would only be seen in the patient's left visual field (LVF), which corresponds to the brain's right hemisphere, and the chicken's claw was placed so it would only be seen in the patient's right visual field (RVF), which corresponds to the brain's left hemisphere.
History of neuroscience
Andreas Vesalius noted many structural characteristics of both the brain and general nervous system during his dissections of human cadavers. In addition to recording many anatomical features such as the putamen and corpus callosum, Vesalius proposed that the brain was made up of seven pairs of 'brain nerves', each with a specialized function. Other scholars furthered Vesalius' work by adding their own detailed sketches of the human brain. René Descartes also studied the physiology of the brain, proposing the theory of dualism to tackle the issue of the brain's relation to the mind. He suggested that the pineal gland was where the mind interacted with the body after recording the brain mechanisms responsible for circulating cerebrospinal fluid. Thomas Willis studied the brain, nerves, and behavior to develop neurologic treatments. He described in great detail the structure of the brainstem, the cerebellum, the ventricles, and the cerebral hemispheres.
Psychoanalysis
Topographic theory was named and first described by Sigmund Freud in "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1899). The theory hypothesizes that the mental apparatus can be divided into the systems Conscious, Preconscious, and Unconscious. These systems are not anatomical structures of the brain but, rather, mental processes. Although Freud retained this theory throughout his life he largely replaced it with the Structural theory. The Topographic theory remains as one of the meta-psychological points of view for describing how the mind functions in classical psychoanalytic theory.
Holonomic brain theory
In 1946 Dennis Gabor invented the hologram mathematically, describing a system where an image can be reconstructed through information that is stored throughout the hologram. He demonstrated that the information pattern of a three-dimensional object can be encoded in a beam of light, which is more-or-less two-dimensional. Gabor also developed a mathematical model for demonstrating a holographic associative memory. One of Gabor's colleagues, Pieter Jacobus Van Heerden, also developed a related holographic mathematical memory model in 1963. This model contained the key aspect of non-locality, which became important years later when, in 1967, experiments by both Braitenberg and Kirschfield showed that exact localization of memory in the brain was false.
Lewy body
In 1910, Fritz Heinrich Lewy was studying in Berlin for his doctorate. He was the first doctor to notice that some unusual proteins in the brain make some people act and think differently, but as of that time, scientists had not been able to determine the purpose of these proteins. His discovery became known as Lewy bodies, as published in the "Handbook of Neurology" in 1912, comparing them to earlier findings by Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora. In 1913, Lafora described another case, and acknowledged Lewy as the discoverer, naming them "cuerpos intracelulares de Lewy" (Lewy bodies). Konstantin Nikolaevich Trétiakoff found them in 1919 in the substantia nigra of PD brains, called them "corps de Lewy" and is credited with the eponym. Eliasz Engelhardt argued in 2017 that Lafora should be credited with the eponym, because he named them six years before Trétiakoff. In 1923, Lewy published his findings in a book, "The Study on Muscle Tone and Movement. Including Systematic Investigations on the Clinic, Physiology, Pathology, and Pathogenesis of Paralysis agitans".
James Crichton-Browne
In 1879, Crichton-Browne published his own considerations of the neuropathology of insanity making some exact predictions about the morbid anatomy of the human brain in cases of severe psychiatric disorder. He proposed that, in the insane, the weight of the brain was reduced, that the lateral ventricles were enlarged, and that the burden of damage fell on the left cerebral hemisphere. This involved an evolutionary view of cerebral localisation with an emphasis on the asymmetry of cerebral functions. He derived this from the clinical research of the French anatomist Paul Broca (1824–1880) on language centres in the brain – originally published in 1861 – and presented by Broca to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its 1868 meeting in Norwich. The question of asymmetrical cerebral functions had been raised many years earlier by the Edinburgh phrenologist Hewett Cottrell Watson in the "Phrenological Journal". Crichton-Browne's own views on psychosis and cerebral asymmetry have been appraised by Crow, 1995 and Compston, 2007.
Mind
Philosopher David Chalmers has argued that the third person approach to uncovering mind and consciousness is not effective, such as looking into other's brains or observing human conduct, but that a first person approach is necessary. Such a first person perspective indicates that the mind must be conceptualized as something distinct from the brain.
Paul Broca
Although history credits this discovery to Broca, another French neurologist, Marc Dax, made similar observations a generation earlier, but he died shortly after with no chance to further his evidence. The brains of many of Broca's aphasic patients are still preserved and available for viewing on a limited basis in the special collections of the Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University (UPMC) in Paris. The collection was formerly displayed in the Musée Dupuytren. His collection of casts is in the Musée d'Anatomie Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière. Broca presented his study on Leborgne in 1861 in the Bulletin of the Société Anatomique.
Peter Milner
Peter Milner (13 June 1919 – 2 June 2018) was a Canadian neuroscientist. He was the husband of Dr. Brenda Milner.
Born in Yorkshire, England, Milner worked at the British Air Defence Research and Development Establishment before moving to Canada in 1944. He was an electrical engineer, but became interested in neuroscience while Brenda was studying the subject at McGill University; he became a graduate student under the same supervisor as she, and later taught at McGill himself. In collaboration with James Olds, he is credited with the discovery of the brain's pleasure centre in 1954.
Neuropsychology
Hippocrates looked upon the brain as the seat of the soul. He drew a connection between the brain and behaviors of the body saying "The brain exercises the greatest power in the man". Apart from moving the focus from the heart as the "seat of the soul" to the brain, Hippocrates did not go into much detail about its actual functioning. However, by switching the attention of the medical community to the brain, the doors were opened to a more scientific discovery of the organ responsible for our behaviors. For years to come, scientists were inspired to explore the functions of the body and to find concrete explanations for both normal and abnormal behaviors. Scientific discovery led them to believe that there were natural and organically occurring reasons to explain various functions of the body, and it could all be traced back to the brain. Over the years, science would continue to expand and the mysteries of the world would begin to make sense, or at least be looked at in a different way. Hippocrates introduced man to the concept of the mind – which was widely seen as a separate function apart from the actual brain organ.
The Concept of Mind
The Concept of Mind is a 1949 book by philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in which the author argues that "mind" is "a philosophical illusion hailing chiefly from René Descartes and sustained by logical errors and 'category mistakes' which have become habitual." The work has been cited as having "put the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism" and has been seen as a founding document in the philosophy of mind, which received professional recognition as a distinct and important branch of philosophy only after 1950.
Broca's Brain
The title essay is named in honor of the French physician, anatomist and anthropologist, Paul Broca (1824–1880). He is best known for his discovery that different functions are assigned to different parts of the brain. He believed that by studying the brains of cadavers and correlating the known experiences of the former owners of the organs, human behavior could eventually be discovered and understood. To that end, he saved hundreds of human brains in jars of formalin; among the collection is his own neural organ. When Sagan finds it in Musée de l'Homme, he poses questions that challenge some core ideas of human existence such as "How much of that man known as Paul Broca can still be found in this jar?"—a question that evokes both religious and scientific argument.
The Mind's I
Part IV explores its titular issue, "Mind as Program". What is the self: the mind, or the body? Can they be separated? Can the location of the consciousness be separate from one's physical location. In that case, where are you, really? Dennett's fantastical account of being separated from his brain and David Sanford's response tackle these issues. In this section the mind is considered as software: as patterns of thought and action, as separate from the physical body housing it as a piece of software is from the machine it runs on.
Computational theory of mind
In philosophy, the computational theory of mind (CTM) refers to a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others, the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology. In the 2000s and 2010s the view has resurfaced in analytic philosophy (Scheutz 2003, Edelman 2008).
Neuroscientist
Plato believed that the brain was the locus of mental processes. However, Aristotle believed instead the heart to be the source of mental processes and that the brain acted as a cooling system for the cardiovascular system.
Cognitive neuroscience
In 1870, German physicians Eduard Hitzig and Gustav Fritsch published their findings about the behavior of animals. Hitzig and Fritsch ran an electric current through the cerebral cortex of a dog, causing different muscles to contract depending on which areas of the brain were electrically stimulated. This led to the proposition that individual functions are localized to specific areas of the brain rather than the cerebrum as a whole, as the aggregate field view suggests. Brodmann was also an important figure in brain mapping; his experiments based on Franz Nissl’s tissue staining techniques divided the brain into fifty-two areas.
Galen
The Stoics, according to Galen, failed to give a credible answer for the localization of functions of the psyche, or the mind. Through his use of medicine, he was convinced that he came up with a better answer, the brain. The Stoics only recognized the soul as having one part, which was the rational soul and they claimed it would be found in the heart. Galen, following Plato's idea, came up with two more parts to the soul.
Costanzo Varolio
He is best remembered for his work on the cranial nerves. He was the first to examine the brain from its base upwards, in contrast with previous dissections which had been performed from the top downwards. In 1573 he published this new method of dissecting the brain whereby he separated the brain from the skull and began the dissection from the base. Varolio described many of the brain's structures for the first time including the pons or "pons Varolii" which is a reflex center of respiration and a communication bridge between spinal cord and brain, the "crura cerebri" and the ileocecal valve.
Another area of interest to him was the mechanism of erectile function. Although the “Musculi erectores penis” (i.e. Mm. bulbospongiosi and ischicavernosi) had already been described by Galen in the 2nd century A.D., this knowledge was lost by the time of Varolio, who re-discovered them and gave a surprisingly accurate description of the mechanism of erection although his inaccurate attribution of erection to "erector muscles" continued to be believed by most anatomists for three centuries.
Ullin Place
Ullin Thomas Place (1924–2000), usually cited as U. T. Place, was a British philosopher and psychologist. Along with J. J. C. Smart, he developed the identity theory of mind. He taught for some years in the Department of Philosophy in the University of Leeds.
Mind–body dualism
Dualism is closely associated with the thought of René Descartes (1641), which holds that the mind is a nonphysical—and therefore, non-spatial—substance. Descartes clearly identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence. Hence, he was the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it exists today. Dualism is contrasted with various kinds of monism. Substance dualism is contrasted with all forms of materialism, but property dualism may be considered a form of emergent materialism or non-reductive physicalism in some sense.
Joseph Bogen
At the time of his death, Bogen had been researching the site in the brain where consciousness is located and was preparing a book about his findings.
History of the location of the soul
In his treatise, "On Anatomy", "pneuma" was inhaled by the lungs and sent to the brain ventricles via the vessels of the body where the brain would convert it into what he called "psychic pneuma", or the soul, and produce thought, motion and all other animations of the body. Herophilus discovered the bumpy aspect of the walls of the ventricles of the brain that he called the choroid plexus and which was thought to be the interaction of the brain with the "pneuma" to create the psychic pneuma and then these were sent out via the nervous system. He further identified 8 of the cerebral nerves and tracked them to the spinal cord and throughout the body. The choroid plexus is the term still used today and are the structures that produce cerebrospinal fluid.
Scientology and psychiatry
In 1923, Navy medical doctor and psychoanalyst, Joseph "Snake" Thompson reportedly accompanied then-12-year-old L. Ron Hubbard from Seattle to Washington, D.C. According to a recording of Hubbard sharing anecdotes from his life, he considered Thompson to be a "very great man" who sparked Hubbard's interest in "the human mind". Hubbard said that Thompson told him, "If it's not true for you, it's not true." Thompson was affiliated with Saint Elizabeth’s in D.C., the first federally operated psychiatric hospital. Thompson died in 1943, seven years before the publication of Dianetics. William Alanson White was an American neurologist and psychiatrist who served as superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital. A letter from the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International to the FBI, dated June 12, 1954, claims that Hubbard was trained by both Joseph Thompson and William Alanson White. In a lecture, Hubbard described consulting White about a theoretical calculation of human memory capacity, apparently during Hubbard's university days. White died in 1937, thirteen years before the publication of Dianetics.
Clotaire Rapaille
Rapaille subscribes to the triune brain theory of Paul D. MacLean, which describes three distinct brains: the cortex, limbic, and reptilian. Beneath the cortex, the seat of logic and reason, is the limbic, which houses emotions. Camouflaged underneath those is Rapaille's theorized brain—the reptilian.
Zona incerta
Its existence was first described by Auguste Forel in 1877 as a "region of which nothing certain can be said". A hundred and thirty years later in 2007, Nadia Urbain and Martin Deschênes of Université Laval noted that the "zona incerta is among the least studied regions of the brain; its name does not even appear in the index of many textbooks."
History of psychology
The 19th century was also the period in which physiology, including neurophysiology, professionalized and saw some of its most significant discoveries. Among its leaders were Charles Bell (1774–1843) and François Magendie (1783–1855) who independently discovered the distinction between sensory and motor nerves in the spinal column, Johannes Müller (1801–1855) who proposed the doctrine of specific nerve energies, Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) who studied the electrical basis of muscle contraction, Pierre Paul Broca (1824–1880) and Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) who identified areas of the brain responsible for different aspects of language, as well as Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927), Eduard Hitzig (1839–1907), and David Ferrier (1843–1924) who localized sensory and motor areas of the brain. One of the principal founders of experimental physiology, Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894), conducted studies of a wide range of topics that would later be of interest to psychologists – the speed of neural transmission, the natures of sound and color, and of our perceptions of them, etc. In the 1860s, while he held a position in Heidelberg, Helmholtz engaged as an assistant a young M.D. named Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt employed the equipment of the physiology laboratory – chronoscope, kymograph, and various peripheral devices – to address more complicated psychological questions than had, until then, been investigated experimentally. In particular he was interested in the nature of apperception – the point at which a perception occupies the central focus of conscious awareness.
Human brain
In the late 19th century, Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hermann von Helmholtz, following the work of their teacher Johannes Peter Müller showed the electrical inpulses which pass along nerves; but unlike Müller's views, that such impulses were able to be observed. Richard Caton in 1875 demonstrated electrical impulses in the cerebral hemispheres of rabbits and monkeys. In the 1820s, Jean Pierre Flourens pioneered the experimental method of damaging specific parts of animal brains describing the effects on movement and behavior.
Studies of the brain became more sophisticated with the use of the microscope and the development of a silver staining method by Camillo Golgi during the 1880s. This was able to show the intricate structures of single neurons. This was used by Santiago Ramón y Cajal and led to the formation of the neuron doctrine, the then revolutionary hypothesis that the neuron is the functional unit of the brain. He used microscopy to uncover many cell types, and proposed functions for the cells he saw. For this, Golgi and Cajal are considered the founders of twentieth century neuroscience, both sharing the Nobel prize in 1906 for their studies and discoveries in this field.
Human brain
In 1316, Mondino de Luzzi's "Anathomia" began the modern study of brain anatomy.
Niccolò Massa discovered in 1536 that the ventricles were filled with fluid. Archangelo Piccolomini of Rome was the first to distinguish between the cerebrum and cerebral cortex. In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published his seven-volume "De humani corporis fabrica". The seventh book covered the brain and eye, with detailed images of the ventricles, cranial nerves, pituitary gland, meninges, structures of the eye, the vascular supply to the brain and spinal cord, and an image of the peripheral nerves. Vesalius rejected the common belief that the ventricles were responsible for brain function, arguing that many animals have a similar ventricular system to humans, but no true intelligence.
Donald O. Hebb
Donald Olding Hebb FRS (July 22, 1904 – August 20, 1985) was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning, which he introduced in his classic 1949 work "The Organization of Behavior". He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His views on learning described behavior and thought in terms of brain function, explaining cognitive processes in terms of connections between neuron assemblies.
Max Bennett (scientist)
Max Bennett was a student at Christian Brothers College, St Kilda and did his undergraduate work in electrical engineering and physics at Melbourne University in 1959, where he founded the Athenian Society dedicated to understanding Plato, Aristotle and Wittgenstein. His interest in brain and mind led to postgraduate research in biology on synapses (1963 – 1966). In 1968 he took up a position as lecturer in physiology at Sydney University, where he was later awarded in 1980 the first and largest Centre of Research Excellence of the 10 established by the Australian Government over all disciplines within Australian universities. He was then appointed Personal Chair, the second in the University’s history, subsequently being made Professor of Neuroscience. In 2000 he was elected to the first University Chair (‘for research recognized internationally as of exceptional distinction’), and in 2003 he was made Founding Director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Sydney, a position he still holds in 2014 at 75.
Neuropsychology
Philosopher René Descartes expanded upon this idea and is most widely known by his work on the mind-body problem. Often, Descartes' ideas were looked upon as overly philosophical and lacking in sufficient scientific background. Descartes focused much of his anatomical experimentation on the brain, paying specific attention to the pineal gland – which he argued was the actual "seat of the soul". Still deeply rooted in a spiritual outlook towards the scientific world, the body was said to be mortal, and the soul immortal. The pineal gland was then thought to be the very place at which the mind would interact with the mortal and machine-like body. At the time, Descartes was convinced the mind had control over the behaviors of the body (controlling the man) – but also that the body could have influence over the mind, which is referred to as dualism. This idea that the mind essentially had control over the body, but man's body could resist or even influence other behaviors was a major turning point in the way many physiologists would look at the brain. The capabilities of the mind were observed to do much more than simply react, but also to be rational and function in organized, thoughtful ways – much more complex than he thought the animal world to be. These ideas, although disregarded by many and cast aside for years led the medical community to expand their own ideas of the brain and begin to understand in new ways just how intricate the workings of the brain really were, and the complete effects it had on daily life, as well, which treatments would be the most beneficial to helping those people living with a dysfunctional mind. The mind-body problem, spurred by René Descartes, continues to this day with many philosophical arguments both for and against his ideas. However controversial they were and remain today, the fresh and well-thought-out perspective Descartes presented has had long-lasting effects on the various disciplines of medicine, psychology and much more, especially in putting an emphasis on separating the mind from the body in order to explain observable behaviors.
Behavioral neuroscience
Behavioral neuroscience as a scientific discipline emerged from a variety of scientific and philosophical traditions in the 18th and 19th centuries. In philosophy, people like René Descartes proposed physical models to explain animal and human behavior. Descartes, for example, suggested that the pineal gland, a midline unpaired structure in the brain of many organisms, was the point of contact between mind and body. Descartes also elaborated on a theory in which the pneumatics of bodily fluids could explain reflexes and other motor behavior. This theory was inspired by moving statues in a garden in Paris.
Enlightenment (spiritual)
The idea that the mind is the result of the activities of neurons in the brain was most notably popularized by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis. The basic idea can be traced back to at least Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. According to Crick, the idea was not a novel one:
China brain
Early versions of this scenario were put forward in 1961 by Anatoly Dneprov, in 1974 by Lawrence Davis, and again in 1978 by Ned Block. Block argues that the China brain would not have a mind, whereas Daniel Dennett argues that it would. The China brain problem is a special case of the more general problem whether minds could exist within other, larger minds.
Mesencephalic locomotor region
The MLR was first described by Shik and colleagues in 1966 when they observed that electrical stimulation of a region of the midbrain in decerebrate cats produced walking and running behavior on a treadmill. Twenty-eight years later, Masdeu and colleagues described the presence of a MLR in humans. It is now widely acknowledged that, along with other motor control centers of the brain, the MLR plays an active role in initiating and modulating the spinal neural circuitry to control posture and gait. Anatomically, as the name suggests, the MLR is located in the mesencephalon (or midbrain), ventral to the inferior colliculus and near the cuneiform nucleus. Although identifying the exact anatomical substrates of the MLR has been subject to considerable debate, the pedunculopontine nucleus (PPN), lateral cuneiform nucleus, and midbrain extrapyramidal area are thought to form the neuroanatomical basis of the MLR. Nuclei within the MLR receive inputs from the substantia nigra of the basal ganglia and neural centers within the limbic system. Projections from the MLR descend via the medullary and pontine reticulospinal tracts to act on spinal motor neurons supplying the trunk and proximal limb flexors and extensors.
History of psychology
Phrenology began as "organology", a theory of brain structure developed by the German physician, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828). Gall argued that the brain is divided into a large number of functional "organs", each responsible for particular human mental abilities and dispositions – hope, love, spirituality, greed, language, the abilities to detect the size, form, and color of objects, etc. He argued that the larger each of these organs are, the greater the power of the corresponding mental trait. Further, he argued that one could detect the sizes of the organs in a given individual by feeling the surface of that person's skull. Gall's ultra-localizationist position with respect to the brain was soon attacked, most notably by French anatomist Pierre Flourens (1794–1867), who conducted ablation studies (on chickens) which purported to demonstrate little or no cerebral localization of function. Although Gall had been a serious (if misguided) researcher, his theory was taken by his assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), and developed into the profitable, popular enterprise of phrenology, which soon spawned, especially in Britain, a thriving industry of independent practitioners. In the hands of Scottish religious leader George Combe (1788–1858) (whose book "The Constitution of Man" was one of the best-sellers of the century), phrenology became strongly associated with political reform movements and egalitarian principles (see, e.g., Shapin, 1975; but also see van Wyhe, 2004). Phrenology soon spread to America as well, where itinerant practical phrenologists assessed the mental well-being of willing customers (see Sokal, 2001).
Timeline of psychiatry
Greek anatomist Erasistratus studied the brain and distinguished between the cerebrum and cerebellum.
Neuropsychology
Neuroanatomist and physiologist Franz Joseph Gall made major progress in understanding the brain. He theorized that personality was directly related to features and structures within the brain. However, Gall's major contribution within the field of neuroscience is his invention of phrenology. This new discipline looked at the brain as an organ of the mind, where the shape of the skull could ultimately determine one's intelligence and personality. This theory was like many circulating at the time, as many scientists were taking into account physical features of the face and body, head size, anatomical structure, and levels of intelligence; only Gall looked primarily at the brain. There was much debate over the validity of Gall's claims however, because he was often found to be wrong in his predictions. He was once sent a cast of René Descartes' skull, and through his method of phrenology claimed the subject must have had a limited capacity for reasoning and higher cognition. As controversial and false as many of Gall's claims were, his contributions to understanding cortical regions of the brain and localized activity continued to advance understanding of the brain, personality, and behavior. His work is considered crucial to having laid a firm foundation in the field of neuropsychology, which would flourish over the next few decades.
History of the location of the soul
The search for a hypothetical soul and its location have been a subject of much speculation throughout history. In early medicine and anatomy the location of the soul was hypothesized and studied to be physically located within the body. Today neuroscientists and other fields of science that deal with the body and the mind, such as psychology, bridge the gap between what is physical and what is corporeal. Aristotle and Plato understood the soul as a corporeal form but closely related to the physical world. The Hippocratic Corpus chronicles the evolution of the evolution of thought, that the soul is located within the body and is manifested in diseased conditions. Later, Galen explicitly used Plato's description of the corporeal soul to physical locations in the body. The logical (λογιστικός) in the brain, the spirited (θυμοειδές) in the heart, and the appetitive (ἐπιθυμητικόν) in the liver.