Anne Green was a lady who was found guilty for killing her unborn child, whilst having a miscarriage. She was hung before the eyes of a crowd for a full half hour and before she was taken down, pronounced dead, and placed in a coffin. There were plans to have an autopsy, but the autopsy never took place because, as if in a scene from a horror film, the coffin began to emit a grumbling sound. Green was alive! The doctors helped here and cared for her all night. The next day she felt better, but the authorities wanted to hang Green again. The doctors Willis and Petty fought for her defense, arguing that her baby had been stillborn and its death was not her fault. Green was set free and went on to marry and have three more children. Willis published his work and because of this he was one of the best-known doctors of his time. He coined the term neurology and he was the first anatomist to link specific brain damage - changes is brain structure - to specific behavioral deficits and to theorize how the brain transfers information. He drew this conclusions after treating patients throughout their lives and autopsying him after their deaths.

What holds the historical perspective?

The scientific field of cognitive neuroscience received its name in the late 1970s. Cognition is about the process of knowing (i.e. what arises from awareness, perception, and reasoning) and neuroscience (the study of how the nervous system is organized and functions). When considering the miraculous properties of brain function, you have to keep in mind that Mother Nature built our brains through the process of evolution by natural selection. Our brains were designed by means of trial and error, and they are made of living cells.

As civilization developed, our ancestors began to spend time looking for causes of and constructing complex theories about the motives of fellow humans. But in these early societies, people thought of the natural world just as they thought of themselves - having thoughts, desires and emotions. The Greeks made the theoretical leap to see the natural world as an object 'it' that could be studied objectively/scientifically.

There has been an underlying tension between two ideas concerning the brain and the conscious mind. Thales represents one perspective, which posits that the flesh-and-blood brain produces thoughts - this is known as monism. Descartes is known for the other perspective, which states that the body had material properties and worked like a machine, whereas the mind was non-material and did not follow the laws of nature. And both could influence each other. He said that this interaction took place in some single brain structure, he later named the pineal gland - this is known as dualism. The cognitive neuroscience takes Thales's monistic perspective that the conscious mind is a product of the brain's physical activity and not separate from it.

What is the story of the brain?

The central issue that lingers around the mind is - whether the mind is enabled by the whole brain working in concert or by specialized parts of the brain working at least partly independently - and fuels most of the modern research in the cognitive neuroscience.

Gall was convinced that the brain was the organ of the mind and that innate faculties were localized in specific regions of the cerebral cortex. His idea was that there were 35 or so specific functions, and every function had his own specific brain region. Gall also said that when a person used a specific function more, that brain region would also grow and be more advanced. This would cause a bump in the overlying skull and he said you could see someones personality through analyzing the skull. This was called phrenology.

Flourens showed that, when destroying parts of the brains of pigeons and rabbits, indeed, certain parts of the brain were responsible for certain functions. For instance, without the cerebellum the animals became uncoordinated and lost their equilibrium. Flourens developed the notion that the whole brain participated in behavior - this is called the aggregate field theory.

Jackson was the first to incorporate suggestions for experiments to test his observations. He proposed a topographic organization in the cerebral cortex: A map of the body was represented across a particular cortical area, where one part would represent the foot, another the lower leg, and so on. Jackson also noticed that it was rare for a patient to lose a function completely.

Broca published the results of his autopsy on a patient named Tan, what is perhaps the most famous neurological case in history. Tan had developed aphasia: he could understand language, but 'tan' was the only word he could utter. Broca found a lesion in his left-hemisphere inferior frontal lobe, nowadays called Broca's area. Here was a specific aspect of language that was impaired by a specific lesion. Wernicke picked up this work and reported on a stroke victim who could talk quite freely but made little sense with what he spoke. The patient could also not understand spoken or written language. He had a lesion in the more posterior region of the left hemisphere, an area in and around where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, now called Wernicke's area. Later this lead to the study of the brain using animals.

How cells differ between brain regions is called cytoarchitectonics, many famous anatomist contributed to work on this phenomenom to subdivide the cortex even further than Brodmann had done. Golgi developed one of the most famous cell stains in the history of the world: 'the black reaction' which impregnated individual neurons with silver chromate. This stain permits visualization of individual neurons in their entirety. But Golgi believed that the whole brain was syncytium - a continuous mass of tissue that shares a common cytoplasm. Cajal was the first to identify the unitary nature of neurons and came with to be known as the neuron doctrine - the concept that the nervous system is made up of individual cells.

What is the psychological story?

Donders first proposed a now common method of using differences in reaction times to infer differences in cognitive processing. He suggested that the difference between the amount of time it took to react to a light bulb and the amount of time it took to react to a particular color light was the amount of time required for the process of identifying a color.

The philosophers who were wondering about the nature of knowledge and how we come to know things were divided over two main positions: rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism holds that all knowledge could be gained through the use of reason alone. Although rationalism is frequently equated with logical thinking, the two are not identical. Rationalism considers such issues as the meaning of life, whereas logic does not, it relies simply on inductive reasoning and not personal mental states. Empiricism is the idea that all knowledge comes from sensory experience, that the brain begins life as a blank slate.

Ebbinghaus was the first to study associationism, and said that complex processes like memory could be measured and analyzed. Thorndike took this a step further and showed that a response that was followed by a reward would be stamped into the organism as a habitual response, if no reward followed, the response would disappear. Assocciationism became the psychological explanation for behavior and Watson dominated the field. He proposed that psychology could only be objective when it was based upon observable behavior. These ideas evolved into behaviorism - learning was the key and everybody had the same neural equipment on which learning could build.

Psychologists in Britain and Canada did not share this behaviorist idea and invented for instance the Montreal procedure for treating epilepsy, in which you surgically destroy the neurons in the brain that produce the seizures. Later Hebb joint this idea and experiment and wrote the well-known neuroscience mantra 'cells that fire together, wire together'. The end of behaviorism came when psychologists began to think in terms of cognition and not just in terms of behavior.

What are the instruments of neuroscience?

Changes in electrical impulses, fluctuations in blood flow and shifts in utilization of oxygen and glucose are the driving forces of the brain's business. They are also measured and analyzed in the various methods used to study how mental activities are supported by brain functions.

Electroencephalography

Einthoven was able to make photographic recordings of the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex, using a galvanometer. He named this type of recording electroencephalography, this remained the sole technique for noninvasive brain study for a number of years.

Measuring blood flow in the brain

Mosso recorded pulsations as blood flowed around and through the cortex in these patients and noticed that the pulsations of the brain increased locally during mental activities such as mathematical calculations. He inferred that blood flow followed function.

Computerized axial tomography

Next to blood flow there was also interest in having good anatomical images that could pinpoint the location of tumors for other developments in instrumentation. Oldendorf wrote an article providing the first description of the basic concept that was later used for CT.

Positron emission tomography and radioactive tracers

While the CT/CAT was great for revealing anatomical detail, it revealed little about function. CAT was used as a basis for developing positron emission tomography (PET), a noninvasive sectioning technique that could provide information about function. The development of PET goes hand in hand with the development of radioactive isotopes, or 'tracers', that it employs. These came from the hand of Curie and her husband. Radioactive forms of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon could be produced and injected into the blood circulation and would become incorporated into biologically active molecules. These molecules would concentrate in an organ, where the radioactivity would begin to decay. The concentration of the tracers would then be measured over time.

Magnetic resonance Imaging

MRI is based on the principle of nuclear magnetic resonance, which was first described by Rabi. The protons in water molecules line up like little bar magnets. If the equilibrium of these protons is disturbed, then a measurable voltage is induced in a receiver coil. The voltage changes over time as a function of the proton's environment. Analysis of the voltages can yield information about the examined tissue.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging

An increase in oxygen delivery permitted more glucose to be metabolized, and thus more energy would be available for performing the task. Fox and Raichle found that although functional activity induced increases in blood flow, there was no corresponding increase in oxygen consumption. Functional MRI does not use ionizing radiation, it combines beautifully detailed images of the body with physiology related to brain function, and it is sensitive.