A brief history of neuroscience

Question 1

What is neuroscience?

Answer 1

It’s the study of the brain and the nervous system in health and disease. With the object of understanding the functions of the nervous systems at many levels (molecular, cellular, synaptic, network, computational, behavioural)

Question 2

What is trepanation?

Answer 2

Believed to be an ancient treatment (7,000 years old; 5,000 BC). An early conceptualisation of a disease or mental illness.
Similar procedures these days release intracranial swelling.

Question 3

What is the oldest known medical writing in history?

Answer 3

Surgical Papyrus (3,000 BC). Written by an Egyptian and discovered by Edwin Smith.

This text featured many sophisticated observations about the brain and its connections, including an understanding of paralysis, and lack of sensation in the body resulting from nerve damage.

Question 4

Who started turning away from divine notions of medicine and used observations of the body as a basis for medical knowledge?

Answer 4

Hippocrates (460-379 BC) (Greece)

Question 5

What is humoral theory of health?

Answer 5

Central to Hippocrates philosophy.
The idea of four bodily fluids or humors. They were blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, and he believed those things needed to be kept in balance for wellness.

Question 6

What was Galens ( 130-210 AD) contribution?

Answer 6

He contributed the idea that ventricles were important in transmitting messages to and from the brain, and this idea actually influenced thinking for another 1,500 years.

Question 7

Who put forth the idea of dualism?

What is dualism?

Answer 7

Rene Descartes (1630)

He put forth the idea of dualism, that the brain and body are mechanical things, but the mind is not physical, and therefore, not subject to scientific observation.

Question 8

Explain the concept of monoism

Answer 8

The mind is a product of physical neural activity.

Question 9

Why Descartes dualism is a problem for neuroscience?

Answer 9

Because it makes the process in the mind intangible, therefore unable to be studied. Difficult to be accepted by all, nevertheless supported by data. Neuroscience, today, to a large extent, operates on the basis that the mind is knowable.

Question 10

What was the first book dedicated to the study of the brain?

What term was used for the first time?

Answer 10

The Anatomy of the Brain by Thomas Willis (1664)

It described reflexes, epilepsy, apoplexy and paralysis, and for the very first time.

The term ‘neurology’ is used.

Question 11

Who created the very first microscope?

Answer 11

Anton Van Leeuwenhoek (1674)

Question 12

Who established that electricity is fundamental to the communication used by the nervous system?

Answer 12

Luigi Galvani (1737-1798)

He would hook dissected frog bodies, nerves up to a source of electricity, and when he would run a current through, the legs would jump.

Question 13

What is the Bell-Magendie law?

Answer 13

A representation of the division of labour within the brain. It was the first time that anyone had ever figured out that information travels in one direction, not two, along sensory and motor nerves

Question 14

What new concepts did Darwin and Wallace bring?

Answer 14

They put forth the idea of evolution and created the idea that we are not fundamentally different from our animal companions, which is very different from how we imagine things in Descartes’ time. They showed us common dissent through evolution, that different species developed unique characteristics, and yet, they retained many common traits.

Question 15

What is meant by science of phrenology? Who came up with the idea?

Answer 15

It is non-invasive and it is an attempt to use a substitute for the brain, the skull, in order to correlate it with aspects of personality and abilities.

An attempt at a legitimate science of understanding human behaviour.

By Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim

Question 16

Who tested the legitimacy of phrenology? How?

Answer 16

Mark Twain.

He went in using a false name and he quotes in some of his writings that the doctor ‘found a cavity and startled me by saying that that cavity represented a total absence of the sense of humor’. Three months later, he went back using his own name, but now, the cavity was gone, and in its place was ‘the loftiest bump of humor he had ever encountered in his lifelong experience’.

Question 17

What did the Pierre Flourens (1794-1867) do?

Answer 17

Applied lesioning to different parts of the cortex and observed changes in behaviour. For ex. that the brain stem, for instance, was critical for breathing; the cerebellum was important for coordination problems.

Question 18

How Paul Broca contributed?

Answer 18

He used both clinical observations of wounded soldiers and autopsy after their death to piece together the ways in which brain damage that occurred on the battlefield was correlated with the deficits that he saw in behaviour in those living men.

Question 19

What functions are linked to:

• Brocas area
• Brain stem
• Cerebellum

Answer 19

Question 20

How Fritsch and Hitzig contribured?

Answer 20

Used in-vivo experimentation on animals in order to demonstrate that there was actually localisation of motor function and that there was contralateral control of our bodies. They observed that when there was damage on one side of the brain that there would be an impact on the other side of the body, and vice versa, and they went forth doing this in animal models in a systematic way.

Question 21

What did Camillo Golgi (1843-1926) develop?

Answer 21

A stain called the Golgi stain, is a way of visualising cells of the brain. It’s unique because the Golgi stain will randomly impregnate cells and show them in their entirety.

Believed that the nervous system was essentially a neural net, a vast network of continuous fibres, all connected, and just really one

Question 22

What was Santiago Ramon y Cajal contribution to the neuroscience field?

Answer 22

He was against Golgi and promoted neuron doctrine (a brain is made of independent cells and talk to each other).

He used Golgi stain to prove his theory of individual cells.

Question 23

What was proposed by John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911)?

Answer 23

A hierarchy of processing in the nervous system.
He imagined it arranged in a functional hierarchy, with the spinal cord at the very base, the brain stem just above and the forebrain on top. He imagined that simple processing was carried out by lower level systems, and sophisticated processing was carried out up on top by the cortex. He largely drew upon Herbert Spencer’s ideas about evolution. What’s great about this attempt to describe information processing in the brain is that it gives us a hypothesis about the kinds of results we might see with damage to particular areas. It is, by its nature, predictive.

Question 24

What was the experiment by Otto Loewi in 1921?

What chemical he discovered?

Answer 24

He is able, with frog hearts and a couple of beakers, to finally determine that in addition to electricity, the chemicals are critical to neurotransmission.

The conclusion was that there was a chemical in the saline, something that he at the time called ‘vagus stuff’, because it had come from the vagus nerve. We now call it acetylcholine.

Question 25

What for Charles Sherrington is credited?

Answer 25

For giving us the word ‘synapse’. Won Nobel prize in 1932