A brief history of Russian research on the autonomic nervous system

The first information on the structure and function of the autonomic nervous system dates back to the time of Galen (second century), while the beginning of the study of the autonomic nervous system in Russia can be traced back to the mid-19th century. This review is devoted to the professional achievements of Russian researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries who were active in the field of the autonomic nervous system at different stages of the development of neuromorphology and neurophysiology. In addition, recent achievements of modern Russian researchers active in this domain are also highlighted. This review is mainly devoted to research on the autonomic nervous system in Russia, but it would be unfair not to mention the scientists who made a significant contribution to this field of science and worked in the republics of the former USSR. Russian morphology and physiology developed under the significant influence of well-known western scientific schools. I sincerely hope that cooperation between Russian and foreign colleagues will continue and will be fruitful for global science.

The death of the cortical column? Patchwork structure and conceptual retirement in neuroscientific practice

In 1981, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for their research on cortical columns-vertical bands of neurons with similar functional properties. This success led to the view that "cortical column" refers to the basic building block of the mammalian neocortex. Since the 1990s, however, critics questioned this building block picture of "cortical column" and debated whether this concept is useless and should be replaced with successor concepts. This paper inquires which experimental results after 1981 challenged the building block picture and whether these challenges warrant the elimination "cortical column" from neuroscientific discourse. I argue that the proliferation of experimental techniques led to a patchwork of locally adapted uses of the column concept. Each use refers to a different kind of cortical structure, rather than a neocortical building block. Once we acknowledge this diverse-kinds picture of "cortical column", the elimination of column concept becomes unnecessary. Rather, I suggest that "cortical column" has reached conceptual retirement: although it cannot be used to identify a neocortical building block, column research is still useful as a guide and cautionary tale for ongoing research. At the same time, neuroscientists should search for alternative concepts when studying the functional architecture of the neocortex. keywords: Cortical column, conceptual development, history of neuroscience, patchwork, eliminativism, conceptual retirement.

The Sherrington-Cushing connection: A bench to bedside collaboration at the dawn of the twentieth century

British physiologist Charles Sherrington (1857-1952) and American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing (1869-1939) were seminal figures in the history of neuroscience. The two came from different worlds, one laboratory-based and the other largely clinical. Their scientific intersection, beginning in July 1901, provides a glimpse into a nascent form of "bench to bedside" collaboration, which carried with it the potential to extend the arm of neurophysiological experimentation from Sherrington's laboratory to Cushing's operatory. I reviewed extensive primary source materials archived at Yale University School of Medicine Library. Sherrington viewed Cushing's bedside work as an opportunity, in humans, to extend his bench-side physiological observations on higher primates, at times almost directing Cushing in the clinic. Cushing would indeed take Sherrington's observations on apes and extend them to his patients, and the work would eventually overturn the prevailing notion that the motor and sensory cortex were intermixed across the Rolandic fissure.

Under the Mind's Hood: What We Have Learned by Watching the Brain at Work

Imagine you were asked to investigate the workings of an engine, but to do so without ever opening the hood. Now imagine the engine fueled the human mind. This is the challenge faced by cognitive neuroscientists worldwide aiming to understand the neural bases of our psychological functions. Luckily, human ingenuity comes to the rescue. Around the same time as the Society for Neuroscience was being established in the 1960s, the first tools for measuring the human brain at work were becoming available. Noninvasive human brain imaging and neurophysiology have continued developing at a relentless pace ever since. In this 50 year anniversary, we reflect on how these methods have been changing our understanding of how brain supports mind.

The White Paper: Wilder Penfield, the Stream of Consciousness, and the Physiology of Mind

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 centrencephalic integrating system. This functional system comprised bidirectional pathways between the upper brainstem, the thalami, and the cerebral cortex of both hemispheres, and was the physical substrate from which memory, perception, initiative, will, and judgment arose. It was the source of the stream of consciousness and the physical basis of mind. This paper reviews how Penfield arrived at this conception of the mind-brain relationship. Although Penfield ultimately felt that he had failed in his attempt to unify brain and mind, his work shed new light on the relationship of memory to the mesial temporal structures and to the temporal cortex; and his association of consciousness and the brainstem preceded the conceptualization of the reticular activating system by a generation. In these, as in so many aspects of neurobiology, Penfield was prescient.

The laryngoscope and nineteenth-century British understanding of laryngeal movements

The source of the human voice is obscured from view. The development of the laryngoscope in the late 1850s provided the potential to see the action of the vocal folds during speaking for the first time. This new instrument materially contributed to the understanding of vocal fold neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropathology. The laryngoscope led to elaborated understanding of disorders that previously were determined by changes in sound. The objective of this paper is to detail the consequences of this novel visualization of the larynx, and to trace how it aided in the development of understanding of the movements of the vocal folds. This is demonstrated through an examination of the activities and practices of a group of London clinicians in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Lord Adrian, MD, PRS, OM

Edgar Douglas Adrian was an outstandingly brilliant, Nobel prize-winning neurophysiologist. He is remembered for developing the all-or-none principle of muscle contraction, and for explaining the minutiae of motor and sensory nerve transmission. He showed that the afferent effect in a neuron depends on the pattern in time of the impulses travelling in it, thereby providing a quantitative basis of nervous behaviour. With Sir Charles Sherrington, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1932 for discoveries on the functions of the neurons.

How the nerves reached the muscle: Bernard Katz, Stephen W. Kuffler, and John C. Eccles-Certain implications of exile for the development of twentieth-century neurophysiology

This article explores the work by Bernard Katz (1911-2003), Stephen W. Kuffler (1913-1980), and John C. Eccles (1903-1997) on the nerve-muscle junction as a milestone in twentieth-century neurophysiology with wider scientific implications. The historical question is approached from two perspectives: (a) an investigation of twentieth-century solutions to a longer physiological dispute and (b) an examination of a new kind of laboratory and academic cooperation. From this vantage point, the work pursued in Sydney by Sir John Carew Eccles' team on the neuromuscular junction is particularly valuable, since it contributed a central functional element to modern physiological understanding regarding the function and structure of the human and animal nervous system. The reflex model of neuromuscular action had already been advanced by neuroanatomists such as Georg Prochaska (1749-1820) in Bohemia since the eighteenth century. It became a major component of neurophysiological theories during the nineteenth century, based on the law associated with the names of François Magendie (1783-1855) in France and Charles Bell (1774-1842) in Britain regarding the functional differences of the sensory and motor spinal nerves. Yet, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that both the histological and the neurophysiological understanding of the nerve-muscle connection became entirely understood and the chemical versus electrical transmission further elicited as the mechanisms of inhibition. John C. Eccles, Bernard Katz, and Stephen W. Kuffler helped to provide some of the missing links for modern neurophysiology. The current article explores several of their scientific contributions and investigates how the context of forced migration contributed to these interactions in contingently new ways.

American neurophysiology and two nineteenth-century American Physiological Societies

This article contrasts two American Physiological Societies, one founded near the beginning of the nineteenth century in 1837 and the other founded near its end in 1887. The contrast allows a perspective on how much budding neuroscience had developed during the nineteenth century in America. The contrast also emphasizes the complicated structure needed in both medicine and physiology to allow neurophysiology to flourish. The objectives of the American Physiological Society of 1887 were (and are) to promote physiological research and to codify physiology as a discipline. These would be accomplished by making physiology much more inclusive than traditionally accepted by raising research standards, by giving prestige to its members, by providing members a source of professional interchange, by protecting its members from antivivisectionists, and by promoting physiology as fundamental to medicine. The quantity of neuroscientific experiments by its members was striking. The main organizers of the society were Silas Weir Mitchell, John Call Dalton, Henry Pickering Bowditch, and Henry Newell Martin. The objective of the American Physiological Society of 1837 was to disperse knowledge of the "laws of life" and to promote human health and longevity. The primary organizers were William Andrus Alcott and Sylvester Graham with the encouragement of John Benson. Its technique was to use physiological information, not create it as was the case in 1887. Its object was to disseminate the word that healthy eating will improve the quality of life.

Soups and Sparks Revisited John Eccles’ Path from the War on Electrical Transmission to Mental Sparks

In the famous debate whether neurons communicate via chemical mediators or electrical signals, Henry Dale and Otto Loewi mounted powerful evidence on the mediation of nervous activity by chemical transmitters, while John Eccles led the campaign for the electrophysiologists. Eventually, Eccles converted to chemical transmission, when he identified excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials initiated by the release of chemical neurotransmitters in the synaptic cleft. This well-known episode from the history of neurophysiology counts as a rare instance of philosophy of science advancing scientific research, because the philosopher Karl Popper had encouraged Eccles to theorize an experiment proving the falsity of his own interpretation – according to Popper’s philosophy of science progressing by falsification. The paper shows how Eccles’ intellectual mobilization was grounded in a series of geographical moves, technological adaptations and re-arrangements of his group. This massive travel of people, ideas, instruments, and techniques mediated between the contradictory views, long before Popper kindled Eccles to reflect about the conflicting paradigms and the new theorizing did hardly change his experimental practice. Popper’s immediate effect was a critical and reflexive distance that enabled Eccles to present his evidence more persuasively, as can be shown from archival sources. The exchanges between Eccles and Popper thus shaped the philosophy of falsification to a powerful strategy for writing science.

The right tool and the right place for the job: the importance of the field in experimental neurophysiology, 1880-1945

This paper seeks to contribute to understandings of practice and place in the history of early American neurophysiology by exploring research with jellyfish at marine stations. Jellyfish became a particularly important research tool to experimental physiologists studying neurological subjects at the turn of the twentieth century. But their enthusiasm for the potential of this organism was constrained by its delicacy in captivity. The discovery of hardier species made experimentation at the shore possible and resulted in two epicenters of neurophysiological research on the American East Coast: the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Carnegie Institution's Dry Tortugas Laboratory. Work done in these locations had impacts on a wide range of physiological questions. These centers were short lived-researchers at the MBL eventually focused on the squid giant axon and the Tortugas lab closed after the death of Mayer-but the development of basic requirements and best practices to sustain these organisms paints an important picture of early experimental neurophysiology. Marine organisms and locations have played an integral role in the development of experimental life sciences in America. By understanding the earliest experimental research done at these locations, and the organisms that lured researchers from the campus to the coastline, we can begin to integrate marine stations into the larger historical narrative of American physiology.

The life of the cortical column: opening the domain of functional architecture of the cortex (1955-1981)

The concept of the cortical column refers to vertical cell bands with similar response properties, which were initially observed by Vernon Mountcastle's mapping of single cell recordings in the cat somatic cortex. It has subsequently guided over 50 years of neuroscientific research, in which fundamental questions about the modularity of the cortex and basic principles of sensory information processing were empirically investigated. Nevertheless, the status of the column remains controversial today, as skeptical commentators proclaim that the vertical cell bands are a functionally insignificant by-product of ontogenetic development. This paper inquires how the column came to be viewed as an elementary unit of the cortex from Mountcastle's discovery in 1955 until David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's reception of the Nobel Prize in 1981. I first argue that Mountcastle's vertical electrode recordings served as criteria for applying the column concept to electrophysiological data. In contrast to previous authors, I claim that this move from electrophysiological data to the phenomenon of columnar responses was concept-laden, but not theory-laden. In the second part of the paper, I argue that Mountcastle's criteria provided Hubel Wiesel with a conceptual outlook, i.e. it allowed them to anticipate columnar patterns in the cat and macaque visual cortex. I argue that in the late 1970s, this outlook only briefly took a form that one could call a 'theory' of the cerebral cortex, before new experimental techniques started to diversify column research. I end by showing how this account of early column research fits into a larger project that follows the conceptual development of the column into the present.

Unsolved Mysteries: The Hippocampus

The continuing explosion of scientific interest in the hippocampus began in the 1950s, initiated in large part by the recognition of the importance of the observations of hippocampectomized monkeys made by Klüver and Bucy and the remarkable memory loss of patient H. M. following temporal lobe surgery. Subsequent to these studies, research and theories about the hippocampus grew exponentially in number and diversity. As yet, no theory of hippocampal function explains all of the phenomena discovered in the clinic or laboratory. In this article, experimental results that have been forgotten or ignored in most theories are presented. Adequate theories of hippocampal function must account for known, reliable postsurgical behavioral observations and consider the conditions under which anomalies are noted. Comprehensive theories will require new approaches in which the interactions of the hippocampus with the central nervous system are understood.

Professor Camillo Negro's Neuropathological Films

Camillo Negro, Professor in Neurology at the University of Torino, was a pioneer of scientific film. From 1906 to 1908, with the help of his assistant Giuseppe Roasenda and in collaboration with Roberto Omegna, one of the most experienced cinematographers in Italy, he filmed some of his patients for scientific and educational purposes. During the war years, he continued his scientific film project at the Military Hospital in Torino, filming shell-shocked soldiers. In autumn 2011, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, in partnership with the Faculty of Neurosciences of the University of Torino, presented a new critical edition of the neuropathological films directed by Negro. The Museum's collection also includes 16 mm footage probably filmed in 1930 by Doctor Fedele Negro, Camillo's son. One of these films is devoted to celebrating the effects of the so-called "Bulgarian cure" on Parkinson's disease.

Memories and Promises of the Enteric Nervous System and Its Functions

This is a very personal reminiscence of the long period of Enteric Nervous System research in which I have been involved. I started to work on the gut in the early 60s really because in Turin when I arrived from Argentina, where my family migrated temporarily after the WWII, nobody was seriously working on the brain. In Anatomy they were studying the neural "intramural plexuses" and that for me was close enough to the nervous system. I grew up in the mountains near Turin near the French border where our ex-family house still bears our name. I joined the Department of Anatomy as an intern student and I was privileged to seat at a desk where a previous generation of young scientists, who studied under the professor of Anatomy A. Levi, the founder of the methods for culturing neural tissue. They were Salvador Luria, Renato Dulbecco and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who, after migrating to the USA, were each were given the Noble prize.

Memories and Promises of the Enteric Nervous System and Its Functions

This is a very personal reminiscence of the long period of Enteric Nervous System research in which I have been involved. I started to work on the gut in the early 60s really because in Turin when I arrived from Argentina, where my family migrated temporarily after the WWII, nobody was seriously working on the brain. In Anatomy they were studying the neural "intramural plexuses" and that for me was close enough to the nervous system. I grew up in the mountains near Turin near the French border where our ex-family house still bears our name. I joined the Department of Anatomy as an intern student and I was privileged to seat at a desk where a previous generation of young scientists, who studied under the professor of Anatomy A. Levi, the founder of the methods for culturing neural tissue. They were Salvador Luria, Renato Dulbecco and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who, after migrating to the USA, were each were given the Noble prize.

The birth of information in the brain: Edgar Adrian and the vacuum tube

As historian Henning Schmidgen notes, the scientific study of the nervous system would have been "unthinkable" without the industrialization of communication in the 1830s. Historians have investigated extensively the way nerve physiologists have borrowed concepts and tools from the field of communications, particularly regarding the nineteenth-century work of figures like Helmholtz and in the American Cold War Era. The following focuses specifically on the interwar research of the Cambridge physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian, and on the technology that led to his Nobel-Prize-winning research, the thermionic vacuum tube. Many countries used the vacuum tube during the war for the purpose of amplifying and intercepting coded messages. These events provided a context for Adrian's evolving understanding of the nerve fiber in the 1920s. In particular, they provide the background for Adrian's transition around 1926 to describing the nerve impulse in terms of "information," "messages," "signals," or even "codes," and for translating the basic principles of the nerve, such as the all-or-none principle and adaptation, into such an "informational" context. The following also places Adrian's research in the broader context of the changing relationship between science and technology, and between physics and physiology, in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

[Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde (1830-1903), forgotten neurologist and neurophysiologist]

Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde (1830-1903), native of Buzet, in Gascony, undertook his medical studies in Paris and was nominated "externe" (1854) then "interne" (1858) of Paris hospitals. His main "patrons" were Alfred Velpeau (1795-1867), Auguste Nélaton (1807-1873), Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881), Pierre-Olive Rayer (1793-1867), Joseph-François Malgaigne (1806-1865), Pierre Carl Edouard Potain (1825-1901), Ernest Charles Lasègue (1816-1883) and Léon Rostan (1790-1866). In 1864 he defended his thesis on the essential paralysis of childhood. He then worked in the physiology laboratory of Professor Jules Auguste Beclard (1818-1887), and became "chef des travaux" of physiology at the Paris faculty of medicine. In 1890, he was nominated to the chair of Biological anthropology at the Paris school of anthropology. His main works focused on the rhythmic tractions of the tongue in cases of apparent death, the understanding of the etiology of brain softening he attributed to vascular occlusions by atheroma and the discovery of connections between the cranial nuclei of common (III) and external (VI) oculomotor nerves and the struggle against the use of ceruse, against tuberculosis and especially against alcoholism. In addition, he made a career in journalism: since 1874 he had been the founder, director and editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper The Medical Tribune, whose aim was to "combine to a fair extent, science and progress with the practice of medicine." Finally, Laborde was a convinced Republican, a friend of Léon Gambetta's (1838-1882). For him, democracy was the "ideal of civilized nations" and he showed deep hatred for the "Commune of Paris". Finally, he was a determined free thinker, who ran the Society for mutual autopsy for a while and who was attached to civil funerals and cremation.

Contending professions: sciences of the brain and mind in the United States, 1850-2013

Argument This paper examines the intersecting histories of psychiatry and psychology (particularly in its clinical guise) in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present. It suggests that there have been three major shifts in the ideological and intellectual orientation of the "psy complex." The first period sees the dominance of the asylum in the provision of mental health care, with psychology, once it emerges in the early twentieth century, remaining a small enterprise largely operating outside the clinical arena, save for the development of psychometric technology. It is followed, between 1945 and 1980, by the rise of psychoanalytic psychiatry and the emergence of clinical psychology. Finally, the re-emergence of biological psychiatry is closely associated with two major developments: an emphasis that emerges in the late 1970s on rendering the diagnosis of psychiatric illnesses mechanical and predictable; and the long-term effects of the psychopharmacological revolution that began in the early 1950s. This third period has seen a shift the orientation of mainstream psychiatry away from psychotherapy, the end of traditional mental hospitals, and a transformed environment within which clinical psychologists ply their trade.

Giovanni Aldini: From Animal Electricity to Human Brain Stimulation

Two hundred years ago, Giovanni Aldini published a highly influential book that reported experiments in which the principles of Luigi Galvani (animal electricity) and Alessandro Volta (bimetallic electricity) were used together for the first time. Aldini was born in Bologna in 1762 and graduated in physics at the University of his native town in 1782. As nephew and assistant of Galvani, he actively participated in a series of crucial experiments with frog's muscles that led to the idea that electricity was the long-sought vital force coursing from brain to muscles. Aldini became professor of experimental physics at the University of Bologna in 1798. He traveled extensively throughout Europe, spending much time defending the concept of his discreet uncle against the incessant attacks of Volta, who did not believe in animal electricity. Aldini used Volta's bimetallic pile to apply electric current to dismembered bodies of animals and humans; these spectacular galvanic reanimation experiments made a strong and enduring impression on his contemporaries. Aldini also treated patients with personality disorders and reported complete rehabilitation following transcranial administration of electric current. Aldini's work laid the ground for the development of various forms of electrotherapy that were heavily used later in the 19th century. Even today, deep brain stimulation, a procedure currently employed to relieve patients with motor or behavioral disorders, owes much to Aldini and galvanism. In recognition of his merits, Aldini was made a knight of the Iron Crown and a councillor of state at Milan, where he died in 1834.

Joseph Erlanger (1874-1965): the cardiovascular investigator who won a Nobel Prize in neurophysiology

Born in San Francisco in 1874 into the family of German immigrants in which he was the only one to proceed beyond elementary education, Joseph Erlanger graduated from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1894. He was about to enter the local Cooper Medical School when he was told that the new medical school in Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) aimed to surpass all others, and there he graduated and was later coached for a career in academic life by William H Howell (1860-1945). In due course he held the Chairs of Physiology in the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and Washington University at St Louis, Missouri. He showed that the Bundle of His is indeed the functional link between the atria and the ventricles in the mammalian heart and that the Korotkoff sounds are produced by a 'breaker' phenomenon resulting from instability of the pulse wave in a partially occluded artery. With Herbert S Gasser (1888-1963) he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944 for their work on action currents in peripheral nerve fibres. The history of science occupied him during his retirement. He died at St Louis in 1965.

A contextual analysis of nervous force in medico-scientific and literary writings in English of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries

This study concerns the context of use of the term "nervous force," as it appears in scientific and literary publications in English over the course of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. The context of use, loss, or waste of nervous force and the context of nervous force as an expression of an attribute are analyzed in 189 scientific and 105 literary writings. Both contexts appeared in literary writings, where nervous force expresses the attributes of strength, forcefulness, vigor, or energy and use, loss or waste of nervous force explains such nonmorbid conditions as why someone is tired or needs rest. Only the context of use-loss-waste appeared in the medico-scientific literature, but here it explained both nonmorbid conditions (for example, effects of old age) and morbid conditions (like epilepsy). Changes in the number of these references give insights into the medico-scientific and the literary disciplines. Discussions include why nervous force is associated with explanation of disease, the persistence of its use in this capacity, and its influence on a similar use in literary writings.

[In memory of W. Heiligenberg]

The article is devoted in memory of outstanding neurophysiologist Walter Heiligenberg, worked for many years in the Department of Neurobiology of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (California, La Hoya). His publications to date exemplify a full understanding of the workings of the brain, perception and processing of sensory signals to them.

A hotbed of medical innovation: George Kellie (1770-1829), his colleagues at Leith and the Monro-Kellie doctrine

The Monro-Kellie doctrine is named after two Scottish doctors, the well-known Alexander Monro secundus and George Kellie, whose life and work has not previously been described in detail. After service as a naval surgeon, Kellie followed his father into a career as a surgeon in the port of Leith, near Edinburgh. His publications show him to be a compassionate and observant doctor, ready to question established concepts. He worked closely with surgical colleagues in the town, some of whom made important contributions in their own right. The paper which led to eponymous fame was based on post-mortem observations on the volume of blood in the cerebral blood vessels, which led him to conclude that a change in volume of one intracranial constituent must be compensated by a reciprocal change in the others. He collaborated with Monro in this work but the doctrine was disseminated by another colleague, John Abercrombie, in his widely read book on neuropathology. Kellie achieved recognition within the local medical community. The doctrine which bears his name remains fundamental to our understanding of pressure and volume relationships within the cranium.

Emil du Bois-Reymond on "The Seat of the Soul"

The German pioneer of electrophysiology, Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), is generally assumed to have remained silent on the subject of the brain. However, the archive of his papers in Berlin contains manuscript notes to a lecture on "The Seat of the Soul" that he delivered to popular audiences in 1884 and 1885. These notes demonstrate that cerebral localization and brain function in general had been concerns of his for quite some time, and that he did not shy away from these subjects.

The life of concepts: Georges Canguilhem and the history of science

Twelve years after his famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (1943), the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) published a book-length study on the history of a single biological concept. Within France, his Formation of the Reflex Concept in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1955) contributed significantly to defining the "French style" of writing on the history of science. Outside of France, the book passed largely unnoticed. This paper re-reads Canguilhem's study of the reflex concept with respect to its historiographical and epistemological implications. Canguilhem defines concepts as complex and dynamic entities combining terms, definitions, and phenomena. As a consequence, the historiography of science becomes a rather complex task. It has to take into account textual and contextual aspects that develop independently of individual authors. In addition, Canguilhem stresses the connection between conceptual activities and other functions of organic individuals in their respective environments. As a result, biological concepts become tied to a biology of conceptual thinking, analogical reasoning, and technological practice. The paper argues that this seemingly circular structure is a major feature in Canguilhem's philosophical approach to the history of the biological sciences.

Coming to grips with a "new" state of consciousness: the study of rapid-eye-movement sleep in the 1960s

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 that cortical activation could occur during sleep. They struggled with picking a name that would capture the essence of REM without focusing on just one aspect of the state. Questioning whether REM in cats could be homologous with that of humans suggested an anthropocentric focus on human dreaming as the essence of the state. The need for biochemical studies was evident given that deprivation of REM caused a rebound in the amount of subsequent REM, which indicated that simple synaptic activity could not support this phenomenon.

Alexander von Humboldt: galvanism, animal electricity, and self-experimentation part 1: formative years, naturphilosophie, and galvanism

During the 1790s, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who showed an early interest in many facets of natural philosophy and natural history, delved into the controversial subject of galvanism and animal electricity, hoping to shed light on the basic nature of the nerve force. He was motivated by his broad worldview, the experiments of Luigi Galvani, who favored animal electricity in more than a few specialized fishes, and the thinking of Alessandro Volta, who accepted specialized fish electricity but was not willing to generalize to other animals, thinking Galvani's frog experiments flawed by his use of metals. Differing from many German Naturphilosophen, who shunned "violent" experiments, the newest instruments, and detailed measurement, Humboldt conducted thousands of galvanic experiments on animals and animal parts, as well as many on his own body, some of which caused him great pain. He interpreted his results as supporting some but not all of the claims made by both Galvani and Volta. Notably, because of certain negative findings and phenomenological differences, he remained skeptical about the intrinsic animal force being qualitatively identical to true electricity. Hence, he referred to a "galvanic force," not animal electricity, in his letters and publications, a theoretical position he would abandon with Volta's help early in the new century.

Alexander von Humboldt: galvanism, animal electricity, and self-experimentation part 2: the electric eel, animal electricity, and later years

After extensive experimentation during the 1790s, Alexander von Humboldt remained skeptical about "animal electricity" (and metallic electricity), writing instead about an ill-defined galvanic force. With his worldview and wishing to learn more, he studied electric eels in South America just as the new century began, again using his body as a scientific instrument in many of his experiments. As had been the case in the past and for many of the same reasons, some of his findings with the electric eel (and soon after, Italian torpedoes) seemed to argue against biological electricity. But he no longer used galvanic terminology when describing his electric fish experiments. The fact that he now wrote about animal electricity rather than a different "galvanic" force owed much to Alessandro Volta, who had come forth with his "pile" (battery) for multipling the physical and perceptable effects of otherwise weak electricity in 1800, while Humboldt was deep in South America. Humboldt probably read about and saw voltaic batteries in the United States in 1804, but the time he spent with Volta in 1805 was probably more significant in his conversion from a galvanic to an electrical framework for understanding nerve and muscle physiology. Although he did not continue his animal electricity research program after this time, Humboldt retained his worldview of a unified nature and continued to believe in intrinsic animal electricity. He also served as a patron to some of the most important figures in the new field of electrophysiology (e.g., Hermann Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond), helping to take the research that he had participated in to the next level.

Cardiocentric neurophysiology: the persistence of a delusion

Aristotle is well known to have taught that the brain was a mere coolant apparatus for overheated blood and to have located the hegemonikon in the heart. This teaching was hotly disputed by his immediate successors in the Alexandrian Museum, who showed that the brain played the central role in psychophysiology. This was accepted and developed by the last great biomedical figure of classical antiquity - Claudius Galen. However, Aristotle's cardiocentric theory did not entirely disappear and this article traces its influence through the Arabic physicians of the Islamic ascendancy, into the European Middle Ages where Albertus Magnus' attempt to reconcile cardiocentric and cerebrocentric physiology was particularly influential. It shows how cardiocentricity was sufficiently accepted to attract the attention of, and require refutation by, many of the great names of the Renaissance, including Vesalius, Fernel, and Descartes, and was still taken seriously by luminaries such as William Harvey in the mid-seventeenth century. The article, in rehearsing this history, shows the difficulty of separating the first-person perspective of introspective psychology and the third-person perspective of natural science. It also outlines an interesting case of conflict between philosophy and physiology.

Looking back at Jerzy Konorski's book "Integrative Activity of the Brain" 45 years after

This article presents historical background preceding writing and publication of Jerzy Konorski book "Integrative Activity of the Brain" followed by a short description of the main topics covered in the book. Two new and original contributions of Konorski are presented in detail, his theory of the motivational processes and the organization of the sensory systems in the brain. Those two contributions are then incorporated in the revised theory of the classical and type II conditioned reflexes which constitutes the core of the book. Conclusions point out at some of the ideas which remained valuable for the present day neuroscientists.

The frog's dancing master: science, séances, and the transmission of myths

Myths are not uncommon in the history of neuroscience and their tenacity even when faced with suitable correctives is impressive. The possible origins and transmission of one such myth is examined: the oft repeated quotation, attributed to Luigi Galvani, that he was the "frog's dancing master." The statement does not occur in Galvani's writing and appears to have accrued features in the early nineteenth century, largely from French writers. In the 1870s, the quotation was used by William Crookes, the discoverer of thallium and inventor of Crookes' tube, in implicit support of his investigations into spiritualist phenomena. Crookes arranged séances with the psychic Daniel Dunglas Home and, being unable to explain them, introduced the concept of psychic force. A related myth concerns Galvani's accidental discovery of the neuromuscular action of electricity in the course of preparing a beneficial broth for his ailing wife. The two myths became entwined in the tangled web woven by commentators of Galvani's work. The myth-information is magnified by the World Wide Web.