Cognitive Neuroscience

Gazzaniga • Ivry • Mangun
Cognitive Neuroscience
THIRD EDITION
Chapter 1
A Brief History of Cognitive
Neuroscience
©2009 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
A historical perspective of cognitive neuroscience
To study how the brain enables the mind
The term coined by Michael Gazzaniga and George Miller in 1970s
Cognition: the process of knowing (i.e., what arises from awareness,
perception, and reasoning)
Neuroscience: the study of the nervous system
Thomas Willis was the first to relate human behavior to
brain structure
Drs. Thomas Willis & William Petty, physicians
in Oxford, examined the body of Anne Green,
and found her miraculous resurrection after
hanging for death on Dec 14, 1650
Thomas Willis (1621–1675), a founder
of clinical neuroscience, coined the term
neurology, also the first anatomist to link
abnormal human behaviors to changes
in brain structure
The human brain (ventral view) drawn by Christopher Wren
for Thomas Willis, published in Willis’s The Anatomy of the
Brain and Nerves.
The central issue in cognitive neuroscience
Whether the mind is enabled by the whole brain working in concert, or by
specialized parts of the brain working at least partly independently
Thomas Willis foreshadowed cognitive neuroscience with the notion that
isolated brain damage could affect behavior
In the 19th century, people who studied phrenology, called phrenologists,
declared that the brain was organized around some 35 or more specific
functions
Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828),
one of the founders of phrenology
The right hemisphere of the brain, according
to Gall and Spurzheim in 1810
Anatomical personology
* Alimentiveness,
1. Destructiveness,
2. Amativeness,
3. Philoprogenitiveness,
4. Adhesiveness,
5. Inhabitiveness,
6. Combativeness,
7. Secretiveness,
8. Acquisitiveness,
9. Constructiveness,
10.Cautiousness,
11. Approbativeness,
12. Self-esteem,
13. Benevolence,
14. Reverence,
15. Firmness,
16. Conscientiousness,
17. Hope,
18. Marvelousness,
19. Ideality,
20. Mirthfulness,
21. Imitation,
22. Individuality,
23. Configuration,
24. Size,
25. Weight and resistance,
26. Coloring,
27. Locality,
28. Order,
29. Calculation,
30. Eventuality,
31. Time,
32. Tune,
33. Language,
34. Comparison,
35. Causality.
The phrenological map of personal
characteristics on the skull, from the
American Phrenological Journal, March 1848
An analysis of Presidents Washington, Jackson,
Taylor, and McKinley by Jessie A. Fowler, from the
Phrenological Journal, June 1898
Fowler & Wells Co. publication on
marriage compatibility in connection
with phrenology, 1888
The central issue in cognitive neuroscience
Whether the mind is enabled by the whole brain working in concert, or by
specialized parts of the brain working at least partly independently
Thomas Willis foreshadowed cognitive neuroscience with the notion that
isolated brain damage could affect behavior
In the 19th century, people who studied phrenology, called phrenologists,
declared that the brain was organized around some 35 or more specific
functions
However, Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens (1794-1867) suggested the
aggregate field theory, and wrote “All sensations, all perceptions, and all
volitions occupy the same seat in these (cerebral) organs. The faculty of
sensation, perception, and volition is then essentially one faculty.”
The posture of a pigeon
deprived of its cerebral
hemispheres, as described
by Flourens
The localizationist view of the brain function
Jackson proposed a topographic
organization of the cerebral cortex,
in which a map of the body is
represented in a particular cortical
area
However, he did not maintain the
strict view of localizationist, rather
he concluded that many regions of
the brain contribute to a given
behavior
John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911), an
English neurologist who was one of the first
to recognize the localizationist view
Focal brain damage causes specific behavioral deficits
Paul Broca (1824–1880)
The connections between the speech centers,
from Wernicke’s 1876 article on aphasia
A = Wernicke’s sensory speech center
B = Broca’s area for speech
Pc = Wernicke’s area concerned with language
comprehension and meaning
The preserved brain of Leborgne
(Broca’s patient “Tan”)
Speech problems in Broca’s aphasia
Speech problems in Wernicke’s aphasia
Fritsch and Hitzig electrically stimulates discrete parts
of a dog brain and observed that this stimulation
produced characteristic movements in the dog
Gustav Theodor Fritsch
(1838–1927), physiologist
and anatomist
Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907),
professor of psychiatry
The original illustration
of the dog’s cortex by
Fritsch and Hitzig
Sampling of the 52 distinct areas described by
Brodmann on the basis of cell structure and arrangement
Early scientists contribute in our
understanding of the nervous system
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723),
and one of the original microscopes
used by Leeuwenhoek, composed of
two brass plates holding the lens
René Descartes (1596–1650)
cogito ergo sum
(English: "I think, therefore I am")
Nerves contained fluid or “spirits”,
and these spirits were responsible
for the flow of sensory and motor
information in the body
Father of modern neuroscience
Camillo Golgi (1843–1926),
cowinner of the Nobel Prize
in 1906
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
(1852–1934), cowinner of
the Nobel Prize in 1906
Golgi’s drawings of different
types of ganglion cells in dog
and cat
Ramón y Cajal’s drawing of the
afferent inflow to the
A bipolar retinal cell, illustrating the
mammalian cortex
dendrites and axon of the neuron
The neuron doctrine
Jan Evangelista Purkinje (1787–1869), who described the first nerve cell in the
nervous system, the Purkinje cell in the cerebellum
Even Freud had come up with the idea of the neuron
as a separate and distinct physiological unit
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
From his work with crayfishes, Freud
published this illustration as an example of
how two nerve fibers connect—a concept
that Ramón y Cajal disproved
Helmholtz was the first to suggest that invertebrates
would be good models for studying vertebrate brains
Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz
(1821–1894)
Helmholtz’s apparatus for measuring the velocity of
nerve conduction
Sir Charles Sherrington coined the term synapse
to describe the junction between two neurons
Sir Charles Sherrington
(1857–1952)
cowinner of the Nobel Prize
in 1932 with Edgar Adrian
Sherrington received the prize for showing that
reflexes require integrated activation and
demonstrated reciprocal innervation of muscles
Female pioneers in neuroscience
Ida Hyde (1857–1945), the first
woman elected to the American
Physiological Society, 1902
Ida Hyde’s microelectrode
Arvanitaki (1939) was the first to demonstrate that spontaneous, rhythmically
recurring activity could be an inherent property of a single nerve without the
requirement of an entire neuronal circuit to generate it
1986 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine
Stanley Cohen Rita Levi-Montalcini
"for their discoveries of growth factors"
2004 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine
Richard Axel
Linda B. Buck
"for their discoveries of odorant
receptors and the organization of
the olfactory system"
The Italian Nobel prize-winning
neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini
has died at the age of 103
(30 Dec, 2012)
French biologist Claude Bernard (1865) wrote,
If it is possible to dissect all the parts of the body, to isolate them in
order to study them in their structure, form and connections, it is
mot the same in life, where all parts cooperate at the same time in
a common aim. An organ does not live on its own, one could often
say it did not exist anatomically, as the boundary established is
sometimes purely arbitrary. What lives, what exists, is the whole,
and if one studies all the parts of any mechanisms separately, one
does not know the way they work.
The localizationist view vs. the connectionist view
Connectomes
The associationism
Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949)
Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study
of the Associative Processes in Animals
A response that was followed by a reward would be stamped into the organism as a
habitual response. If no reward followed a response, the response would disappear.
Thus, rewards provided a mechanism for establishing a more adaptive response.
Learning is the key
JB Watson could turn any baby into anything
John B. Watson (1878–1958)
Watson and “Little Albert” during one of Watson’s
fear-conditioning experiments
Although behaviorism had important theories to
offer, it could not explain all learning
George A. Miller
The Magic Number Seven,
Plus-or-Minus Two
Noam Chomsky
The language is universal
1956, a big year in cognitive neuroscience