Introduction,
Human Scient interest in the function of the brain, dates back at least four thousand years go, back to the times of ancient Egypt. In 1962 Edwin Smith an American egyptologist purchased an antique scroll from an Egyptian antiques dealer, having recognized it’s importance as historical artifact without knowing its content. Edwin was unable to translate scroll and died in 1906 after which his daughter donated the papyrus to New York Historical Society where its importance was recognized by Caroline Ransom Williams, who contracted James Henry Breasted in 1920 to work on translating the scrolls hieratic text. A task which took 10 years to complete. Today the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus, as it has come to be known, is widely recognized as the earliest recorded scientific treatise on neurosurgery dating back ca. 1600 BC (likely even older). The scroll contained the scribed medical notes of an ancient Egyptian physician’s. Describing the examination, prognosis and recommended treatments for 48 cases. All cases of upper body injuries, organized in descending order starting from the head and brain. Most remarkably the physicians notes are anatomy, physiology and pathology oriented rarely invoking mysticism to explain the unknown. Within its text is contained the earliest known references to cranial sutures, the meninges, the external surface of the brain, the cerebrospinal fluid, intracranial pulsations, the contralateral relationship between brain side and body side, and the relationship between brain injury location and specific regional body impairment. Medical knowledge surpassing that of Hippocrates, the ‘Father of Medicine’, who would not be born for a thousand years c 460 BC.
The idea that the mind was a product of brain function rather than as separate from the body, arguably begins in the Western World c.500 BC in Greece with Socrates and the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method involves asking each person to examine the soundness of ones own argument in a discussion. Socrates’ influence survived the test of time despite his arrest and death, through his students, most influential of whom was Plato and subsequently his student Aristotle. Whos ideas will have a forever resonant influence on the history of natural science in all branches and philosophy. However interest in the mind appear to fade in history following with Aristotle’s death in 322 BC. Its not until the 17th century that intellectual giants like Galileo, Descartes, and Boyle would further explore the relationship between the brain and the mind spurring the field of psychology. Then in 1915 the French physiologist Marie Jean Pierre Flourens presented the first experimental evidence that the mind was a construct of the brain. Flourens pioneered Ablative Brain Surgery, removing different parts of the nervous system from animals and observing what effects were caused by the removal. Through his work, he was able to determine that that while memory and cognition, were represented in a diffuse form around the brain, different functions could indeed be ascribed to particular regions (even if not strictly localized) as such the mind, like the other brain functions could be a product of the brain.
Now in the early 21st century we have begun to understand the complexity and mechanisms of the brain at a molecular and circuit levels resolution. With largescale government and academic collaborative projects like Human Brain Project in Europe, and the Brain Initiative Project in the US, which aim to develop new research technologies to study the brain, and private initiatives like the Allen Brain Institute which is working on creating an atlas of the brain and thousands of academic neuroscience laboratories. We are now beginning to understand the mechanisms behind the brains functions and probe directly questions of the the mind and higher order brain functions.
This notebook contains my exploration of the current frontier in cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, I am interested in the interplay between the genetic and environmental influences on learning, intelligence, problem solving and creativity. I begin with the assumption that to understand these neural processes, knowledge of the interplay between molecular triggers within neural circuitry will be sufficient to understand the mechanism behind our complex cognitive minds.
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