Mind - The Mind Before Neurology, Descartes's Ambiguous Legacy, Thomas Willis And The Birth Of Neurology
investigation mental components lives
The science of mind is the empirical and theoretical search for the foundations of our mental lives. Unlike other subjects of scientific investigation, such as stars or rocks, human mental lives defy easy definition. Yet few would dispute that such a definition would have to encompass consciousness, emotions, reasoning, language, memory, and perception. As far back as ancient Greece, one can find accounts of how these faculties are produced by the body or the soul. But it was only in the seventeenth century that they became subjects of modern scientific investigation. In the subsequent centuries, scientists have sought to dissect the mind into its components, and to assign those components to different structures of the brain. While a full history of the science of mind would demand thousands of pages, a survey of a few key topics can give a sense of its development.
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To many readers, the relationship between the brain and mind may be obvious, but that has not always been the case. In 1652, for example, the philosopher Henry More (1614–1687) declared that the brain "is no more capable of thought than a cake of suet or a bowl of curds" (Zimmer, p. 5). Medieval and Renaissance physicians sought to understand the mind with a mix of Christian t…
Descartes managed to take a crucial step towards a science of the nervous system, despite the fact that he was woefully confused about the brain. He accepted the medieval notion of spirits flowing through the ventricles. He even used it to determine where the rational soul was located. For Descartes, it was obvious that the pineal gland, which was believed to dangle over the ventricles, had to be …
The modern study of the body's functions began with the work of the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657). Harvey trained at the University of Padua, where he learned Aristotle's methods of comparative zoology and functional anatomy. He returned to England and eventually became a royal physician to James I and Charles I, during which time he discovered the circulation o…
Neurology advanced during the 1700s and early 1800s, as researchers discovered electricity's role in the nervous system and mapped out reflex pathways between the spine and limbs. But Willis's most ambitious project—to work out the foundations of the mind—did not see major advances until the mid-1800s. The huge technical challenge of studying many aspects of human cogni…
Cognitive neuroscience, which focuses on how the mind emerges from the brain, first developed as a discipline in the 1960s. Unlike Willis or Broca, contemporary cognitive neuroscientists can build on the extraordinary advances in the understanding of the brain that took place in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, it is now accepted that the brain is composed of several billi…
Contemporary cognitive neuroscience has made important strides in analyzing the mind. Three areas of particularly intense research are perception, emotion, and consciousness. Contemporary cognitive neuroscience focuses on aspects of mind that are both important and scientifically tractable. A vast amount of research has been carried out on perception, and in particular, on vision. Researchers have…
Albright, Thomas D., et al. "Neural Science: A Century of Progress and the Mysteries That Remain." Cell 100 Supplement (2000): S1–55. Brazier, Mary Agnes Burniston. A History of Neurophysiology in the 19th Century. New York: Raven Press, 1988. Churchland, Patricia Smith. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Damasio, An…
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