Customer Reviews

Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (History of Neuroscience)

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Most histories of neuroscience tend to be mere recountings of events, not actual histories. This is not merely a timeline or an ordering of facts, but a philosophically sophisticated telling of how we have come to understand the mind and the brain. I trained as a historian of science at Cambridge, and I am on my way to becoming a neurosurgeon --- I wish I had written this book. If you want to understand today's mind-brain problem, this is the book that tells you how we got here. It is also the book that highlights that some of the central scientific directions are not necessarily great leaps forward, but may represent pendulum swings in a larger debate about behavior and the brain, specifically regarding whether the brain acts as circuits or is composed of discrete processing centers. It's a shame the author left history for psychoanalysis!