Brain, Vision, Memory - Charles G. Gross.pdf - psB - DarkDream

Brain, Vision, Memory

Charles G. Gross

"Gross's tales of the history of neuroscience can be warmly recommended to

all students of the brain, but especially to those who believe that history

began when they were undergraduates. Informative and amusing in equal

part, Gross is as fair to those who were wildly wrong as to those who were

(relatively) right. . . . Never less than fascinating."

John C. Marshall, Nature

Charles G. Gross is an experimental neuroscientist who

specializes in brain mechanisms in vision. He is also fascinated

by the history of his field. In these engaging tales describing the

growth of knowledge about the brain -- from the early

Egyptians and Greeks to the Dark Ages and the Renaissance to

the present time -- he attempts to answer the question of how

the discipline of neuroscience evolved into its modern

incarnation through the twists and turns of history.

Introduction

I am an experimental neuroscientist specializing in brain mechanisms in vision,

and a teacher of neuroscience. This introduction explains what led me tempo-

rarily to put aside my experiments and neglect my students to write the ªve

tales on the history of neuroscience.

The ªrst essay began in 1960. I had just completed the experimental work

for my Ph.D. thesis, “Some Alterations in Behavior after Frontal Lesions in

Monkeys,” at Cambridge University and sat down to write the requisite review

of the literature. Six months later I had reached Galen and the second century.

At that point, my advisor, Larry Weiskrantz, suggested that, actually, it might

be better if I got on with the write-up of my experiments, even though, as I

explained to him, Galen had carried out experiments on frontal lobe damage

in piglets. So I never included this historical survey in my thesis, and ultimately

its review of previous work began with studies in the 1930s.

I did show my “up to Galen” manuscript to Joseph Needham. He wrote

me an encouraging note, resplendent with Chinese characters, comparing Greek

pneuma with Chinese chi. After graduate school I went to the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Hans-Lukas

Teuber, the charismatic founder of the Department of Psychology, now the

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Gross, 1994a). I showed him my

Introduction

history manuscript and proposed to continue working on it on the side. Teuber

was deeply knowledgeable about the history of biology, almost as deeply as he

pretended to be; however, he assured me that I had no time “on the side” and

should save history for my retirement days.

Despite this advice, when I began to teach what became my perennial

undergraduate course on physiological psychology (later renamed cognitive

neuroscience), ªrst at Harvard and then at Princeton, I increasingly inserted

historical interludes on Vesalius, Willis, and Gall, and other “high points in

man’s understanding of his brain.” When some of the premedical students in

the course started getting restless at the length of these interludes, I began

occasionally teaching a separate course entitled “Ideas on Brain Function from

Antiquity to the Twentieth Century.”

After the (perceived) success, described below, of my paper on the

hippocampus minor, I reached into my “up to Galen” draft and my history of

neuroscience lecture notes and began revising and updating them for publica-

tion. So when I was asked a few years ago to write an article on visual cortex

for the multivolume handbook Cerebral Cortex I seized the opportunity to

achieve my thwarted ambition to write a historical introduction starting at the

beginning. I began with the ªrst written mention of the brain from the pyramid

age, went on to investigations and theories of brain function among Greek

physician-philosopher-scientists, and continued through the coma of European

science between Galen and the Renaissance. At that point in the article, for

obvious practical reasons (my word limit and, certainly, my time were not

inªnite), I began to narrow my subject, ªrst to the cerebral cortex and then,

by the end of the article, to striate cortex. Chapter 1, “From Imhotep to Hubel

and Wiesel: The Story of Visual Cortex” is a combination of that article (Gross,

1997c) and one I wrote entitled “Aristotle and the Brain” for the Neuroscientist

(Gross, 1995).

The second essay was inspired by a visit to an exhibit of Leonardo’s

anatomical drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The

rooms were dimly lit and the hushed crowd slowly and reverentially shifted

from drawing to drawing of bones, muscles, and viscera, all borrowed from the

Introduction

Queen’s collection at Windsor Castle. No pamphlets were available nor were

there explanations on the walls, not even labels or dates of the drawings. What

were we looking at? The drawings of the superªcial musculature seemed

accurate enough and certainly beautiful. But the viscera often seemed rather

strange, the organs not looking quite right or in the correct places. Of course,

I had previously seen his two drawings of brain ventricles, one a purely

medieval three circles in the head and the other a realistic, but not quite human

ventricular system. I became intrigued as to what Leonardo was illustrating in

these famous drawings: the body observed? the body remembered? the body

read about? the body rumored? the human body, or animals in human form?

Was he illustrating medieval theory, as in the drawing of circular ventricles? Or

was he drawing from his own dissection, as in the later ventricular drawing?

Hence, eventually, the article on Leonardo’s anatomy. Although it is restricted

to a detailed discussion of only a few of Leonardo’s neuroanatomical drawings,

I think my comments are applicable to his other biological work. Chapter 2,

“Leonardo da Vinci on the Eye and Brain,” was ªrst published in the Neuro-

scientist (Gross, 1997b).

The third essay derived from the question of whether there can be a

theoretical biology or a theoretical biologist. Certainly I see no sign yet of

anyone who made signiªcant and lasting theoretical contributions while re-

maining only a theorist. All the great theoretical work was done by individuals

buried up to their necks if not their eyebrows with empirical data all their busy

lives, such as Darwin, Mendel, Bernard, Sherrington, and even Freud. In

contrast, those individuals who were only theorists and did little empirical

slogging, such as Lotka, Reshevsky, and D’arcy Thompson, have disappeared

except as antiquarian curios.

Was Emmanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic, an

exception? Solely on the basis of reading the literature of the day, he proposed

theories of the functions of the cerebral cortex, of the organization of motor

cortex, and of the functions of the pituitary gland that were at least 200 years

ahead of everyone else. On the other hand, perhaps he was no exception since,

although he often got it right, he never had any impact on biology. Indeed,

Introduction

his work was published and republished in many volumes, but his ideas on the

brain continued to go unnoticed until after those that were actually correct

were rediscovered independently. Chapter 3, “Emanual Swedenborg: A Neu-

roscientist Before His Time,” ªrst published in the Neuroscientist, tells his story

(Gross, 1997a).

The fourth essay originated when my wife, Greta Berman, bought me a

copy of Desmond and Moore’s biography of Darwin soon after it appeared.

She had been attracted by a very enthusiastic blurb on the back cover written

by a friend of ours. At ªrst I was skeptical, as the book had been rather

negatively reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by my old history of

science teacher, I. B. Cohen. But as soon as I began to read, I realized what

an absolutely splendid book it was, a truly exciting page turner placing Darwin

in his social, economic, and scientiªc world.

Right in the middle of the book I encountered several references to a

lobe of the brain called the hippocampus minor. I do sometimes come across

names of unfamiliar brain structures, but never a whole lobe, particularly one

that was supposed to be unique to humans. As I looked into more accounts of

Victorian biology and the battles over evolution, I realized that although the

hippocampus minor was repeatedly mentioned by historians of evolution, it

was clear that none of them had any idea of what or where it was. Apparently

they had never read or even looked at the pictures in the many articles about

the hippocampus minor in midnineteenth-century scientiªc and popular jour-

nals. Furthermore, I could ªnd no mention of such a structure in any of my

neuroanatomy textbooks (until later when I looked at outdated ones). When I

called several of my friends around the country who were among the leading

students of the anatomy and physiology of the hippocampus, they too had never

heard of the hippocampus minor. Clearly, there was or should have been a

ready audience for a paper on this mysterious structure. Hence I researched and

wrote “The Hippocampus Minor and Man’s Place in Nature: A Case Study in

the Social Construction of Neuroanatomy,” a version of which constitutes

chapter 4. It tells what the hippocampus minor is, why it was so important in

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