Journal of the history of the neurosciences
September 29, 2026
Emmanuel Drouin
Contemporary neuroscience often presents modern theories of consciousness as products of the cognitive revolution and computational neuroscience. Yet several neurophysiologists before and during the early cybernetic period had already developed sophisticated physiological models of conscious states grounded in bodily regulation, autonomic integration, hypothalamic function and global neural...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
2026
Brendan P Lucey
Systematic efforts to localize brain functions began in the nineteenth century through comparative neurological studies and clinicopathological correlations. By the early-twentieth century, investigations into the microstructure of cortical tissue enabled further subdivision of the cortex into distinct regions, laying the foundation for correlating anatomical structure with function. Advances...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
2026
Ricardo Serrado
This article examines the nineteenth-century Portuguese medical-philosophical debate on consciousness and free will, at a time when advances in the biological and physiological sciences were undermining the notion of the soul as a regulating principle. The works of physicians Miguel Bombarda, Júlio de Matos, and Bettencourt Raposo are analyzed, showing how determinism, materialism, and...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
2024
Alan Baumeister
Understanding and characterizing the relationship between mental phenomena and the brain is a huge challenge for modern neuroscience. No doubt, the conservative orthodox view of this relationship can be described as physicalist. Physicalism is the idea that, no matter how enigmatic mental phenomena may seem, they are nevertheless completely describable in physical and material terms. Still,...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
2019
Richard Leblanc
Wilder Penfield is justly famous for his contributions to our understanding of epilepsy and of the structure-function relationship of the brain. His theory on the relationship of the brain and mind is less well known. Based on the effects of the electrical stimulation of the cortex in conscious patients, Penfield believed that consciousness and mind are functions of what he referred to as the...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
2013
Adrian R Morrison
The recognition of rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM) and its association with dreaming in 1953 by Aserinsky and Kleitman opened a new world to explore in the brain. Discussions at two major symposia in the early 1960s reveal that a state with characteristics resembling both wakefulness and sleep was overturning accepted views of the regulation of the two states. Participants grappled with the idea...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
September 1, 2005
C U M Smith
The revolution in the foundations of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century suggested to several of its most prominent workers that biology was ripe for something similar. In consequence, a number of physicists moved into biology. They were highly influential in initiating a molecular biology in the 1950s. Two decades later it seemed to several of these migrants, and those they had...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
June 1, 2005
Luis-Carlos Alvaro
Maupassant excelled as a realist writer of the nineteenth century, with fantastical short stories being an outstanding example of his literary genius. We have analysed four of his fantastical stories from a neurological point of view. In "Le Horla," his masterpiece, we have found nightmares, sleep paralysis, a hemianopic pattern of loss and recovery of vision, and palinopsia. In "Qui sait" and...
Journal of the history of the neurosciences
1995
F Schiller
Since antiquity this tiny intracranial appendicular organ has aroused sexual connotations and denials. Controversial and enigmatic, it played a significant part in the development of endocrinology and even neurosurgery. What was its histology, what was its role as a gland so intimately attached to the brain? What did comparative anatomists make of it in the light of its function as a 'third...