Cursul 1 – Introducere în neuropsihologie

Bibliografie video

Toate pasajele albastre din text sunt linkuri pe care se poate da click (și, Doamne-ferește,
citi și în plus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKJlSY0DBBA – Înțelegerea lui Derrida, deconstrucție și “Despre
gramatologie”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yxg2_6_YLs – Then & Now – Introducere în Baudrillard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf9J35yzM3E – Cuck Philosophy – Ce credea Baudrillard despre Matrix?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv6QHxkBFzY – Ted Aschulter – Marea dezbatere neurologică

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFNpcIfvOnA&t - Daniel David - Despre Liberul Arbitru. Decizii Libere: Există?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yj3nGv0kn8 - Nancy Kanwisher – Un portret neuronal al minții umane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhRhtFFhNzQ – David Chalmers – Cum explici conștiința?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeZ-U0pj9LI – Thomas Insel – Către o nouă înțelegere a psihopatologiei

 localizaționism vs. holism vs. dualism vs. materialism
echipotențialism monism vs. idealism

glanda pineală. CUI PRODEST? Cine are câtă

MITURI putere politică în ce epocă și cum
frenologie
decide “adevărul științific”?

de la neurologie la neurobullshit (conflicte de interese și (in)accesibilitatea creierului –

neuropsihologie la referințe gratuite la neuroimagistică cutia craniană, bariera
psihologie cognitivă la irelevantă afirmațiilor făcute) hematoencefalică, LCR, religie,
neuroștiință cognitivă politică, epistemologie, finanțe
Bibliografie 1
David J. Linden – Mintea ca întâmplare. Cum ne-a oferit evoluția creierului
iubirea, memoria, visele și pe Dumnezeu, p.7-10;
“Creierul mare, întocmai ca un guvern mare, s-ar putea să nu fie
capabil să facă lucruri simple într-un mod simplu”

Donald O. Hebb

Prolog

Creierul, explicat

Partea cea mai bună în a fi cercetător în domeniul neuroştiinţei este că,

în anumite ocazii, poţi părea că ai capacitatea de a citi minţile
oamenilor. De exemplu, la petreceri. Cu paharul de Chardonnay în
mână, gazda iţi face una din acele prezentări în care se simte obligată
să-ţi menţioneze ocupaţia: „El este David. E cercetător în neuroştiinţă".
În acel moment, mulţi oameni sunt suficient de înţelepţi să-ţi întoarcă
pur şi simplu spatele şi să piece să-şi pună un whisky cu gheaţă. Dintre
cei care rămân, cam jumătate sigur vor face o pauză, îşi vor îndrepta
ochii spre ceruri şi-şi vor ridica sprâncenele pregătindu-se să vorbească.
„Eşti pe cale să mă întrebi dacă este adevărat că oamenii utilizează
doar 10% din creier, nu-i aşa?" Ei vor încuviinţa mut, făcând ochii mari.
Un episod uimitor de „citire a găndurilor".

Odată ce treci de chestia cu „10% din creier" (despre care ar trebui să

menţionez că nu are nicio bază în realitate), devine clar că mulţi oameni au o curiozitate profundă legată de
funcţionarea creierului. Întrebări cu adevărat fundamentale şi dificile se ivesc imediat:

„Chiar ajută muzica clasică la dezvoltarea cerebrală a bebeluşului meu?"

„Există vreun motiv biologic pentru faptul că evenimentele din vise sunt atât de bizare?"

„Este creierul homosexualilor diferit din punct de vedere fizic de creierul heterosexualilor?”

„De ce nu pot să mă gâdil singur?"

Toate acestea sunt întrebări importante. La unele din ele, cel mai bun răspuns ştiinţific este destul de clar, iar la
altele este întrucâtva evaziv. Este amuzant să vorbeşti cu nespecialişti în neuroştiinţă despre acest tip de lucruri,
deoarece ei nu se tem să-ţi adreseze întrebările grele şi să te pună în dificultate. Deseori, când conversaţia se
încheie, oamenii întreabă: „Poţi recomanda vreo carte bună despre creier şi comportament adresată
nespecialiştilor?" Asta mă pune iar în dificultate. Există unele cărţi, cum ar fi Synaptic Self a lui Joe LeDoux care e
grozavă pe partea ştiinţifică, dar dificilă dacă nu ai licenţă în biologie sau psihologie. Altele, cum ar fi The Man
Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales a lui Oliver Sacks sau Phantoms in the Brain scrisă de V.S.
Ramachandran şi de Sandra Blackeslee, ce relatează poveşti clarificatoare şi fascinante bazate pe cazuri reale din
neurologie, nu transmit cu adevărat o înţelegere cuprinzătoare a funcţionării creierului şi ignoră în mare măsură
moleculele şi celulele. Există cărţi care vorbesc despre moleculele şi celulele din creier, dar multe dintre ele sunt
ucigător de plictisitoare - începi să simţi cum sufletul îţi părăseşte corpul inainte de a termina de citit prima
pagină. În plus, multe cărţi despre creier, şi încă şi mai multe emisiuni de televiziune educaţionale pe aceeaşi
temă, perpetuează o neînţelegere fundamentală legată de funcţionarea neurală. Ele prezintă creierul ca fiind
un mecanism superb meşterit şi optimizat, superlativul absolut al designului. Probabil aţi văzut şi voi: un creier
uman, luminat dramatic dintr-o parte, cu camera rotindu-se de sus in jurul lui ca un elicopter filmând
monumentul Stonehenge şi o voce baritonală modulată care ridică în slăvi designul elegant al creierului, cu
tonuri pătrunse de respect. Pure inepţii. Creierul nu este proiectat deloc elegant: este o învălmăşeală încropită
care, în mod uimitor şi în ciuda neajunsurilor pe care le are, reuşeşte să îndeplinească o serie de funcţii
impresionante. Dar în timp ce funcţionarea lui globală este impresionantă, designul lui nu este. Mai important,
planul alambicat, ineficient şi bizar al creierului şi al părţilor lui constitutive este fundamental pentru
experienţa noastră umană. Textura particulară a sentimentelor, percepţiilor şi acţiunilor este derivată, în mare
măsură, din faptul că creierul nu este o maşină de rezolvat probleme optimizată, generică, ci mai degrabă o
aglomerare ciudată de soluţii ad-hoc acumulate de-a lungul a milioane de ani de istorie evoluţionistă.

Aşadar, iată ce voi încerca să fac. Voi fi ghidul tău în această lume stranie şi deseori ilogică a funcţionării neurale,
având ca sarcină specială să-ţi expun cele mai neobişnuite şi contraintuitive aspecte ale designului cerebral şi neural
şi să-ţi explic cum ne modelează ele viaţa. În special, voi încerca să te conving că limitările designului alambicat,
evoluat al creierului au condus în ultimă instanţă la multe caracteristici extraordinare şi unice: copilăriile noastre
lungi, capacitatea mnezică extinsă (ce reprezintă substratul pe care experienţa creează individualitatea noastră),
căutarea relaţiilor de iubire pe termen lung, nevoia noastră de a născoci povești fascinante și, în ultimă instanță
ultimă instanţă, impulsul cultural universal de a crea explicaţii religioase. De-a lungul drumului, voi trece pe scurt în
revistă fundamentele biologiei necesare pentru înţelegerea lucrurilor care bănuiesc că te interesează cel mai mult
în ceea ce priveşte creierul şi comportamentul. Ştii tu, chestiile alea tari: emoţia, iluzia, memoria, visele, iubirea şi
sexul şi, desigur, poveşti neobişnuite cu gemeni. Apoi, îmi voi da toată silinţa să răspund la întrebările mari şi să fiu
onest când răspunsurile nu sunt la îndemână sau sunt incomplete.

Max Delbrück, un pionier al geneticii moleculare, a spus: „Imaginează-ţi că auditoriul tău are zero cunoaştere, dar
inteligenţă infinită". Mi se pare corect ce a spus el, aşa că asta voi încerca şi eu să fac.

Aşadar, să începem.

Bibliografie 2
Matthew Cobb – The Idea of the Brain. A
History, p.12-13;
Introduction

In 1665 the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno addressed a small

group of thinkers gathered together at Issy, on the southern
outskirts of Paris. This informal meeting was one of the origins
of the French Académie des Sciences; it was also the moment
that the modern approach to understanding the brain was set
out. In his lecture, Steno boldly argued that if we want to
understand what the brain does and how it does it, rather than
simply describing its component parts, we should view it as a
machine and take it apart to see how it works.

This was a revolutionary idea, and for over 350 years we have been
following Steno’s suggestion – peering inside dead brains,
removing bits from living ones, recording the electrical activity of
nerve cells (neurons) and, most recently, altering neuronal
function with the most astonishing consequences. Although most
neuroscientists have never heard of Steno, his vision has dominated centuries of brain science and lies at the root
of our remarkable progress in understanding this most extraordinary organ.

We can now make a mouse remember something about a smell it has never encountered, turn a bad mouse
memory into a good one and even use a surge of electricity to change how people perceive faces.We are
drawing up increasingly detailed and complex functional maps of the brain, human and otherwise. In some species
we can change the brain’s very structure at will, altering the animal’s behaviour as a result. Some of the most
profound consequences of our growing mastery can be seen in our ability to enable a paralysed person to control a
robotic arm with the power of their mind.

We cannot do everything: at least for the moment, we cannot artificially create a precise sensory experience in a
human brain (hallucinogenic drugs do this in an uncontrolled way), although it appears that we have the exquisite
degree of control required to perform such an experiment in a mouse. Two groups of scientists recently trained
mice to lick at a water bottle when the animals saw a set of stripes, while machines recorded how a small number
of cells in the visual centres of the mice’s brains responded to the image. The scientists then used complex
optogenetic technology to artificially recreate that pattern of neuronal activity in the relevant brain cells. When this
occurred, the animal responded as though it had seen the stripes, even though it was in complete darkness. One
explanation is that, for the mouse, the pattern of neuronal activity was the same thing as seeing. More clever
experimentation is needed to resolve this, but we stand on the brink of understanding how patterns of activity in
networks of neurons create perception.

This book tells the story of centuries of discovery, showing how brilliant minds, some of them now forgotten, first
identified that the brain is the organ that produces thought and then began to show what it might be doing. It
describes the extraordinary discoveries that have been made as we have attempted to understand what the brain
does, and delights in the ingenious experiments that have produced these insights.

But there is a significant flaw in this tale of astonishing progress, one that is rarely acknowledged in the many books
that claim to explain how the brain works. Despite a solid bedrock of understanding, we have no clear
comprehension about how billions, or millions, or thousands, or even tens of neurons work together to
produce the brain’s activity.

We know in general terms what is going on – brains interact with the world, and with the rest of our bodies,
representing stimuli using both innate and acquired neural networks. Brains predict how those stimuli might change
in order to be ready to respond, and as part of the body they organise its action. This is all achieved by neurons and
their complex interconnections, including the many chemical signals in which they bathe. No matter how much it
might go against your deepest feelings, there is no disembodied person floating in your head looking at this activity
– it is all just neurons, their connectivity and the chemicals that swill about those networks.

However, when it comes to really understanding what happens in a brain at the level of neuronal networks and their
component cells, or to being able to predict what will happen when the activity of a particular network is altered,
we are still at the very beginning. We might be able to artificially induce visual perception in the brain of a mouse
by copying a very precise pattern of neuronal activity, but we do not fully understand how and why visual perception
produces that pattern of activity in the first place.

A key clue to explaining how we have made such amazing progress and yet have still barely scratched the
surface of the astonishing organ in our heads is to be found in Steno’s suggestion that we should treat the
brain as a machine. ‘Machine’ has meant very different things over the centuries, and each of those meanings
has had consequences for how we view the brain. In Steno’s time the only kinds of machine that existed were
based on either hydraulic power or clockwork. The insights these mahcines could provide about the structure and
function of the brain soon proved limited, and no one now looks at the brain this way. With the discovery that nerves
respond to electrical stimulation, in the nineteenth century the brain was seen first as some kind of telegraph
network and then, following the identification of neurons and synapses, as a telephone exchange, allowing for
flexible organisation and output (this metaphor is still occasionally used in research articles).

Since the 1950s our ideas have been dominated by concepts that surged into biology from computing –
feedback loops, information, codes and computation. But although many of the functions we have identified in
the brain generally involve some kind of computation, there are only a few fully understood examples, and some of
the most brilliant and influential theoretical intuitions about how nervous systems might ‘compute’ have turned
out to be wrong. Above all, as the mid-twentieth-century scientists who first drew the parallel between brain and
computer soon realised, the brain is not digital. Even the simplest animal brain is not a computer like anything
we have built, nor one we can yet envisage. The brain is not a computer, but it is more like a computer than it is
like a clock, and by thinking about the parallels between a computer and a brain we can gain insight into what is
going on inside both our heads and those of animals.Exploring these ideas about the brain – the kinds of machine
we have imagined brains to be – makes it clear that, although we are still far from fully understanding the brain, the
ways in which we think about it are much richer than in the past, not simply because of the amazing facts we
have discovered, but above all because of how we interpret them.

These changes have an important implication. Over the centuries, each layer of technological metaphor has
added something to our understanding, enabling us to carry out new experiments and reinterpret old findings. But
by holding tightly to metaphors, we end up limiting what and how we can think. A number of scientists are now
realising that, by viewing the brain as a computer that passively responds to inputs and processes data, we forget
that it is an active organ, part of a body that is intervening in the world and which has an evolutionary past that has
shaped its structure and function. We are missing out key parts of its activity. In other words, metaphors shape
our ideas in ways that are not always helpful.The tantalising implication of the link between technology and brain
science is that tomorrow our ideas will be altered yet again by the appearance of new and as yet unforeseen
technological developments. As that new insight emerges, we will reinterpret our current certainties, discard some
mistaken assumptions and develop new theories and ways of understanding. When scientists realise that how they
think – including the questions they can ask and the experiments they can imagine – is partly framed and limited by
technological metaphors, they often get excited at the prospect of the future and want to know what the Next Big
Thing will be and how they can apply it to their research. If I had the slightest idea, I would be very rich.

The history of how we have understood the brain contains recurring themes and arguments, some of which
still provoke intense debate today. One example is the perpetual dispute over the extent to which functions are
localised in specific areas of the brain. That idea goes back thousands of years, and there have been repeated
claims up to today that bits of the brain appear to be responsible for a specific thing, such as the feeling in your
hand, or your ability to understand syntax or to exert self-control. These kinds of claims have often soon been
nuanced by the revelation that other parts of the brain may influence or supplement this activity, and that the brain
region in question is also involved in other processes. Repeatedly, localisation has not exactly been overturned, but
it has become far fuzzier than originally thought. The reason is simple. Brains, unlike any machine, have not been
designed. They are organs that have evolved for over five hundred million years, so there is little or no reason
to expect they truly function like the machines we create. This implies that although Steno’s starting point –
treating the brain as a machine – has been incredibly productive, it will never produce a satisfying and full
description of how brains work. Understanding how past thinkers have struggled to understand brain function is
part of framing what we need to be doing now, in order to reach that goal. Our current ignorance should not be
viewed as a sign of defeat but as a challenge, a way of focusing attention and resources on what needs to be
discovered and on how to develop a programme of research for finding the answers. That is the subject of the
final, speculative part of this book, which deals with the future. Some readers will find this section provocative, but
that is my intention – to provoke reflection about what the brain is, what it does and how it does it, and above all to
encourage thinking about how we can take the next step, even in the absence of new technological metaphors. It
is one of the reasons this book is more than a history, and it highlights why the four most important words in
science are ‘We do not know’.
Bibliografie 3
Mihai Ioan Botez – Neuropsihologie clinică și neurologia comportamentului, p.3-
5;
Introducere istorică și critică în problema
localizărilor cerebrale

Bruno Cardu

Generalități și scurt istoric

Neuropsihologia, în sens larg, reprezintă examenul legăturii

între activitatea psihologică şi afecţiunea cerebrală
corespunzătoare. Ea studiază cum modificările de la nivelul
creierului afectează comportamentul: cum, de exemplu, ablaţia
regiunilor prefrontale la om îi va modifica acestuia capacităţile
intelectuale sau caracterul: cum ablaţia regiunilor infero-
temporale la maimuţe va influenţa percepţia şi memoria
vizuală, cum ablaţia extensivă a cortexului cerebral la sobolani
va modifica invățarea unui labirint cu mai multe fundături.

Răspunsul la aceste întrebări implică o dublă abordare

cantitativă:

1.pe de o parte, există abordarea ştiinţifică a psihologiei, care

vizează descrierea obiectivă şi înţelegerea funcţiilor ca percepţia, memoria, inteligenţa, limbajul, şi,

2.pe de altă parte, este vorba de ansamblul de cunoştinţe ştiinţifice despre creier, descrise de neuroanatomia
macroscopică şi microscopică (citoarhitectonică, traiecte nervoase), neurofiziologie, neurochimie, neurologie
clinică.

În general, în neuropsihologie se diferenţiază: neuropsihologia clinică, neuropsihologia experimentală, neurologia

comportamentului şi neuropsihologia cognitivă.

1.neuropsihologia clinică are ca obiect măsurarea şi analizarea, la om, a modificărilor capacităţilor intelectuale,
perceptuale, mnezice şi a modificărilor de personalitate apărute în urma unei leziuni cerebrale ca un accident
vascular, o intoxicaţie, o ablaţie sau propagarea intracerebrală a unei tumori. Neuropsihologul clinician stabileşte
diagnosticul leziunilor cerebrale, ţinând cont de dublul aspect psihologic şi neurologic. Pe plan psihologic, el va
utiliza teste standardizate care permit evaluarea şi situarea performanţelor psihologice ale unui pacient în interiorul
scalei cantitative a testului. Pe plan neurologic, el va avea sarcina de a stabili comportamentul pacientului, şi, în
colaborare cu neurologul şi neuroradiologul, de a stabili localizarea leziunii cerebrale, întinderea sa şi repercusiunile
asupra creierului în ansamblu. Cercetarea în neuropsihologia clinică va utiliza deseori comparaţii statistice între
loturi mari de pacienţi şi martori normali.

2.neuropsihologia experimentală răspunde cerinţei de rigoare şi de cercetare fundamentală în studiul relaţiei

creier-comportament. Cercetarea în neuropsihologia experimentală are loc deseori (dar nu totdeauna) fără
precauțiuni de aplicare, şi îi datorim contribuții importante în cunoașterea mecanisemelor cerebrale ale
comportamentului, cum ar fi motivația, fenomenul de autostimulare, rolul corpului calos, etc. Este vorba, de
exemplu, de experiențe de secționare a corpului calos la pisici și la maimuțe care au modificat problematica de corp
calos la om.

3.neurologia comportamentului este o disciplină particulară, care se concentrează asupra analizei aprofundate a
cazurilor individuale, ca sursă de date generalizabile. În loc să evalueze un comportament raportându-l la o scală
cantitativă prealabilă, ea studiază cazurile individuale organizând situații test care permit diferențierea deviațiilor
anormale de funcționarea normală.

4.neuropsihologia (neuroștiința) cognitivă, foarte răspândită și influentă la ora actuală, are ca scop al cercetării
înțelegerea mecanismelor psihologiei normale, plecând de la modificările de comportament induse de leziunile
cerebrale la oameni. Ea nu se interesează de localizarea leziunii ca atare, nici de localizarea cerebrală a funcţiilor
psihologice; ea încearcă mai ales să înţeleagă cum, plecând de la dezintegrarea psihologică produsă de leziune,
se poate defini organizarea psihoiogică normală.

Cititorul interesat va putea găsi o ilustrare a acestui curent de gândire în lucrările lui McCarthy şi Warrington şi ale
lui Seron. Concepţia modernă a creierului, ca motor al activităţii psihologice, este o cucerire relativ recentă,
care datează, în forma actuală, numai de la sfârşitul secolului 18. Frenologia lui Franz Joseph Gall ocupă aici un
loc important. Gall era un anatomist valoros, adept al psihologiei "facultăţilor” mentale. El a propus existența unor
facultăţi separate cum ar fi inteligenţa, memoria, percepţia, fiind astfel primul teoretician care a afirmat că aceste
funcții psihice ar putea avea localizări precise în anumite regiuni ale creierului. El propusese că ariile creierului
implicate în funcțiile respective exercitau o presiune asupra porţiunii de craniu corespunzătoare, dând naştere unor
proeminenţe craniene numite «bose». Ar fi fost suficientă, în opinia lui, examinarea lor pe craniul unei persoane,
pentru a face inventarul psihologic al facultăţilor sale mentale. Această concepţie, chiar atât de fantezistă pe cât
e azi, reprezintă prima tentativă importantă de a lega funcții psihologice de arii ale creierului. Astfel a luat naştere
teoria localizărilor cerebrale. Doctrina lui Gall a fost însă intens combătută de contemporanii săi. Unul din cei mai
mari adversari ai săi a fost fiziologul francez Pierre Flourens primul care a studiat sistematic efectul leziunilor
cerebrale asupra comportamentului la animale. În urma unor studii experimentale complexe, el a diferenţiat şase
unităţi ale sistemului nervos - emisferele cerebrale, cerebelul, corpii cvadrigemeni, bulbul, măduva spinării şi nervii.
Emisferelor cerebrale le corespundeau voinţa, judecata, amintirile, percepţia; dar toate aceste funcţii constituiau
pentu el o facultate esenţialmente unică, nelocalizabilă precis. Pierre Flourens a fost precursorul
antilocalizaţioniştilor moderni.

De la polernica Gall-Flourens, evoluţia teoriei localizărilor cerebrale seamănă cu o spirală cu mai multe nivele. La
fiecare nivel, dialectica localizaţionistă şi antilocalizaţionistă este reluată, o generaţie sau două mai târziu, cu noi
argumente provenite din noi descoperiri. De exemplu, teza avansată de Paul Broca în 1861, după care limbajul
articulat este localizat în piciorul celei de-a treia circumvoluţiuni frontale din emisfera stângă, constituia prima
localizare serioasă a unei funcţii psihologice într-o parte determinată a creierului. În această introducere, nu vom
expune istoria descoperirilor care ar putea duce la confirmarea tezelor localizaţioniste sau antilocalizaţioniste.
Aceasta poate fi găsită într-un mare număr de lucrări specializate. Ceea ce ne propunem noi este de a descrie
funcţionarea a două concepţii opuse şi de a analiza ponderea argumentelor în favoarea fiecăreia. Nu există o
corespondenţă univocă între o concepţie teoretică în psihologie şi o concepţie cerebrală localizaţionistă sau
holistică (non localizaţionistă). Până la sfarşitul secolului 19, doctrina asociaţionistă era dominată atât la
localizaţionişti (Broca, Wernicke, Dejerine etc.) cât și de holiști sau non-localizaţionişti (Hughlings Jackson,
Henry Head, von Monakow şi Mourgue). Mai târziu, o a doua concepţie holistică, inspirată din psihologia Gestalt-
ului, a fost argumentată în neuropsihologie de către Kurt Goldstein şi Karl Lashley.
Bibliografie 4

Bryan Kolb; Ian Q. Whishaw – Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology, Fifth

Edition, p.1-3
The Development of Neuropsychology

The term neuropsychology in its English version originated

quite recently, in part because it represented a new approach
to studying the brain. According to Daryl Bruce, it was first
used by Canadian physician William Osler in his early-
twentieth-century textbook, which was a standard medical
reference of the time. It later appeared as a subtitle to
Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb’s 1949 treatise on
brain function, The Organization of Behavior: A
Neuropsychological Theory. Although Hebb neither defined
nor used the word in the text itself, he probably intended it
to represent a multidisciplinary focus of scientists who
believed that an understanding of human brain function was
central to understanding human behavior. By 1957, the term
had become a recognized designation for a subfield of the
neurosciences. Heinrich Klüver, an American investigator
into the neural basis of vision, wrote in the preface to his
Behavior Mechanism in Monkeys that the book would be of
interest to neuropsychologists and others. (Klüver had not
used the term in the 1933 preface to the same book.) In 1960,
it appeared in the title of a widely read collection of writings
by American psychologist Karl S. Lashley—The Neuropsychology of Lashley—most of which described rat and
monkey studies directed toward understanding memory, perception, and motor behavior. Again, neuropsychology
was neither used nor defined in the text. To the extent that they did use the term, however, these writers, who
specialized in the study of basic brain function in animals, were recognizing the emergence of a subdiscipline of
investigators who specialized in human research and would find the animal research relevant to understanding
human brain function. Today, we define neuropsychology as the study of the relation between human brain
function and behavior. Although neuropsychology draws information from many disciplines—for example
anatomy, biology, biophysics, ethology, pharmacology, physiology, physiological psychology, and
philosophy — its central focus is the development of a science of human behavior based on the function of the
human brain. As such, it is distinct from neurology, which is the diagnosis of nervous system injury by physicians
who are specialists in nervous system diseases, from neuroscience, which is the study of the molecular basis of
nervous system function by scientists who mainly use nonhuman animals, and from psychology, which is the study
of behavior more generally. Neuropsychology is strongly influenced by two traditional foci of experimental and
theoretical investigations into brain function: the brain hypothesis, the idea that the brain is the source of behavior;
and the neuron hypothesis, the idea that the unit of brain structure and function is the neuron. This chapter traces
the development of these two ideas. We will see that, although the science is new, its major ideas are not.

THE BRAIN HYPOTHESIS

People knew what the brain looked like long before they had any idea of what it did. Very early in human history,
hunters must have noticed that all animals have a brain and that the brains of different animals, including humans,
although varying greatly in size, look quite similar. Within the past 2000 years, anatomists began producing
drawings of the brain and naming some of its distinctive parts without knowing what function the brain or its parts
performed. We will begin this chapter with a description of the brain and some of its major parts and will then
consider some major insights into the functions of the brain.

What Is the Brain?

Brain is an Old English word for the tissue that is found within the skull. Figure 1.1 shows a typical human brain as
oriented in the skull of an upright human. The brain has two relatively symmetrical halves called hemispheres, one
on the left side of the body and one on the right. Just as your body is symmetrical, having two arms and two legs,
so is the brain. If you make your right hand into a fist and hold it up with the thumb pointing toward the front, the
fist can represent the position of the brain’s left hemisphere within the skull. Taken as a whole, the basic plan of the
brain is that of a tube filled with fluid, called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Parts of the covering of the tube have bulged
outward and folded, forming the more complicated looking surface structures that initially catch the eye.

The most conspicuous outer feature of the brain consists of a crinkled tissue that has expanded from the front of
the tube to such an extent that it folds over and covers much of the rest of the brain. This outer layer is known as
the cerebral cortex (usually referred to as just the cortex). The word cortex, which means “bark” in Latin, is aptly
chosen both because the cortex’s folded appearance resembles the bark of a tree and because its tissue covers most
of the rest of the brain, just as bark covers a tree. The folds of the cortex are called gyri, and the creases between
them are called sulci (gyrus is Greek for “circle” and sulcus is Greek for “trench”). Some large sulci are called fissures,
such as the longitudinal fissure that divides the two hemispheres and the lateral fissure that divides each
hemisphere into halves (in our fist analogy, the lateral fissure is the crease separating the thumb from the other
fingers). The cortex of each hemisphere is divided into four lobes, named after the skull bones beneath which they
lie.

The temporal lobe is located at approximately the same place as the thumb on
your upraised fist. The lobe lying immediately above the temporal lobe is called
the frontal lobe because it is located at the front of the brain. The parietal lobe
is located behind the frontal lobe, and the occipital lobe constitutes the area at
the back of each hemisphere.

The cerebral cortex comprises most of the forebrain, so named because it

develops from the front part of the tube that makes up the embryo’s primitive
brain. The remaining “tube” underlying the cortex is referred to as the
brainstem.

The brainstem is in turn connected to the spinal cord, which descends down the
back in the vertebral column. To visualize the relations between these parts of
the brain, again imagine your upraised fist: the folded fingers represent the
cortex, the hand represents the brainstem, and the arm represents the spinal
cord. This three-part division of the brain is conceptually useful evolutionarily,
anatomically, and functionally. Evolutionarily, animals with only spinal cords preceded those with brainstems,
which preceded those with forebrains. Likewise, in prenatal development, the spinal cord forms before the
brainstem, which forms before the forebrain. Functionally, the forebrain mediates cognitive functions; the
brainstem mediates regulatory functions such as eating, drinking, and moving;

THE NEURON HYPOTHESIS

After the development of the brain hypothesis, that the brain is responsible for all behavior, the second major
influence on modern neuropsychology was the development of the neuron hypothesis, the idea that the nervous
system is composed of discrete, autonomous units, or neurons, that can interact but are not physically connected.
In this section, we will first provide a brief description of the cells of the nervous system, and then we will describe
how the neuron hypothesis led to a number of ideas that are central to neuropsychology.
Nervous System Cells

The nervous system is composed of two basic kinds of cells, neurons and glia (a name that comes from the Greek
word for “glue”). The neurons are the functional units that enable us to receive information, process it, and produce
actions. The glia help the neurons out, holding them together (some do act as glue) and providing other supporting
functions. In the human nervous system, there are about 100 billion neurons and perhaps 10 times as many glial
cells. (No, no one has counted them all. Scientists have estimated the total number by counting the cells in a small
sample of brain tissue and then multiplying by the brain’s volume.)

Figure 1.8 shows the three basic parts of a

neuron. The neuron’s core region is called the cell
body. Most of a neuron’s branching extensions
are called dendrites (Latin for “branch”), but the
main “root” is called the axon (Greek for “axle”).
Neurons have only one axon, but most have
many dendrites. Some small neurons have so
many dendrites that they look like garden
hedges. The dendrites and axon of the neuron
are extensions of the cell body, and their main
purpose is to extend the surface area of the cell.
The dendrites of a cell can be a number of
millimeters long, but the axon can extend as long
as a meter, as do those in the pyramidal tract that
extend from the cortex to the spinal cord. In the
giraffe, these same axons are a number of meters
long. Understanding how billions of cells, many
with long, complex extensions, produce behavior
is a formidable task, even with the use of the
powerful instrumentation available today. Just
imagine what the first anatomists with their
crude microscopes thought when they first
began to make out some of the brain’s structural
details. But insights into the cellular organization
did follow. Through the development of new,
more powerful microscopes and techniques for
selectively staining tissue, good descriptions of
neurons emerged. By applying new electronic
inventions to the study of neurons, researchers
began to understand how axons conduct
information. By studying how neurons interact
and by applying a growing body of knowledge
from chemistry, they discovered how neurons
communicate and how learning takes place.

The Neuron
The earliest anatomists who tried to examine the
substructure of the nervous system found a
gelatinous white substance, almost a goo.
 Eventually it was discovered that, if brain tissue were placed in alcohol or
formaldehyde, water would be drawn out of the tissue, making it firm. Then, if
the tissue were cut into thin sections, many different structures could be seen. Early
theories described nerves as hollow, fluid containing tubes; however, when the first
cellular anatomist, Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), examined nerves with a
primitive microscope, he found no such thing. He did mention the presence of
“globules,” which may have been cell bodies. As microscopes improved, the various
parts of the nerve came into ever sharper focus, eventually leading Theodor
Schwann, in 1839, to enunciate the theory that cells are the basic structural units of
the nervous system, just as they are for the rest of the body.

An exciting development in visualizing cells was the introduction of staining, which

allows different parts of the nervous system to be distinguished. Various dyes used
for staining cloth in the German clothing industry were applied to thinly cut tissue
with various results: some selectively stained the cell body, some stained the
nucleus, and some stained the axons. The most amazing cell stain came from the
application of photographic chemicals to nervous system tissue. Italian anatomist
Camillo Golgi (1843–1926) in 1875 impregnated tissue with silver nitrate (one of the
substances responsible for forming the images in black-and-white photographs)
and found that a few cells in their entirety—cell body, dendrites, and axons—
became encrusted with silver. This technique allowed the entire neuron and all its
processes to be visualized for the first time. Golgi never described how he had been
led to his remarkable discovery. Microscopic examination revealed that the brain
was nothing like an amorphous jelly; rather, it had an enormously intricate
substructure with components arranged in complex clusters, each interconnected
with many other clusters.

How did this complex organ work? Was it a net of physically interconnected fibers
or a collection of discrete and separate units? If it were an interconnected net, then
changes in one part should, by diffusion, produce changes in every other part. Because it would be difficult for a
structure thus organized to localize function, a netlike structure would favor a holistic, or “mind,” type of brain
function and psychology.

Alternatively, a structure of discrete units functioning autonomously would favor a psychology characterized
by localization of function. In 1883, Golgi suggested that axons, the longest fibers coming out of the cell body, are
interconnected, forming an axonic net. Golgi claimed to have seen connections between cells, and so he did not
think that brain functions were localized. This position was opposed by Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal
(1852–1934), on the basis of the results of studies in which he used Golgi’s own silver-staining technique. Cajal
examined the brains of chicks at various ages and produced beautiful drawings of neurons at different stages of
growth. He was able to see a neuron develop from a simple cell body with few extensions to a highly complex cell
with many extensions. He never saw connections from cell to cell. Golgi and Cajal jointly received the Nobel Prize
in 1906; each in his acceptance speech argued his position on the organization of neurons, Golgi supporting the
nerve net and Cajal supporting the idea of separate cells.

Information conduction

We have mentioned early views that suggested a hydraulic flow of liquid through nerves into muscles (reminiscent
of the way that filling and emptying changes the shape and hardness of a balloon). Such theories have been called
balloonist theories. Descartes espoused the balloonist hypothesis, arguing that a fluid from the ventricles flows
through nerves into muscles to make them move English physician Francis Glisson (1597–1677) in 1677 made a direct
test of the balloon hypothesis by immersing a man’s arm in water and measuring the change in the water level when
the muscles of the arm were contracted. Because the water level did not rise, Glisson concluded that no fluid
entered the muscle (bringing no concomitant change in density). Johan Swammerdam (1637–1680) in Holland
reached the same conclusion from similar experiments on frogs, but his manuscript lay unpublished for 100 years.
(We have asked students in our classes if the water will rise when an immersed muscle is contracted. Many predict
that it will.)

The impetus to adopt a theory of electrical conduction in neurons came from an English scientist, Stephen Gray
(1666–1736), who in 1731 attracted considerable attention by demonstrating that the human body could conduct
electricity. He showed that, when a rod containing static electricity was brought close to the feet of a boy suspended
by a rope, a grass-leaf electroscope (a thin strip of conducting material) placed near the boy’s nose would be
attracted to the boy’s nose. Shortly after, Italian physicist Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) demonstrated that electrical
stimulation of a frog’s nerve could cause muscle contraction. The idea for this experiment came from his
observation that frogs’ legs hanging on a metal wire in a market twitched during an electrical storm. In 1886, Joseph
Bernstein (1839–1917) developed the theory that the membrane of a nerve is polarized (has a positive charge on
one side and a negative charge on the other) and that an electric potential can be propagated along the membrane
by the movements of ions across the membrane. Many of the details of this ionic conduction were worked out by
English physiologists Alan Hodgkin (1914–1988) and Andrew Huxley (1917– 2012), who received the Nobel Prize in
physiology in 1963.

As successive findings refuted the hydraulic models of conduction and brought more dynamic electrical models into
favor, hydraulic theories of behavior were also critically reassessed. For example, Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund
Freud (1856–1939) had originally envisioned the biological basis of his theory of behavior, with its three
levels
of id, ego, and superego, as being a hydraulic mechanism of some sort. Although conceptually useful for a
time, it had no effect on concepts of brain function, because there was no evidence of the brain functioning
as a hydraulic system.

Connections Between Neurons as the Basis of Learning

Even though neurons are independent structures, they must influence one another. Charles Scott Sherrington
(1857–1952), an English physiologist, examined how nerves connect to muscles and first suggested how
the connection is made. He applied an unpleasant stimulation to a dog’s paw, measured how long it took the
dog to withdraw its foot, and compared that rate with the speed at which messages were known to travel along
axons. According to Sherrington’s calculations, the dog took 5 milliseconds too long to respond. Sherrington
theorized that neurons are connected by junctions, which he called synapses (from the Greek word for “clasp”),
and that additional time is required for the message to get across the junction. The results of later electron
microscopic studies were to confirm that synapses do not quite touch the cells with which they synapse. The general
assumption that developed in response to this discovery was that a synapse releases chemicals to influence the
adjacent cell. In 1949, on the basis of this principle, Donald Hebb proposed a learning theory stating that, when
individual cells are activated at the same time, they grow connecting synapses or strengthen existing ones
and thus become a functional unit. He proposed that new or strengthened connections, sometimes called
Hebb or plastic synapses, are the structural bases of memory. Just how synapses are formed and change is a
vibrant area of research today.

Modern developments

Given the nineteenth-century advances in knowledge about brain structure and function—the brain and neuron
hypotheses, the concept of the special nature of cortical function, and the concepts of localization of function and
of disconnection—why was the science of neuropsychology not established by 1900 rather than after
1949, when the word neuropsychology first appeared? There are several possible reasons. In the
1920s, some scientists still rejected the classical approach of Broca, Wernicke, and others, arguing that
their attempts to correlate behavior with anatomical sites were little more sophisticated than the attempts
of the phrenologists. Then two world wars disrupted the progress of science in many countries. In
addition, psychologists, who traced their origins to philosophy rather than to biology, were not interested
in physiological and anatomical
approaches, directing their attention instead to behaviorism, psychophysics, and the psychoanalytical
movement.

A number of modern developments have contributed to the emergence of neuropsychology as a distinct scientific
discipline: neurosurgery; psychometrics (the science of measuring human mental abilities) and statistical
analysis; and technological advances, particularly those that allow a living brain to be imaged.

Bibliografie 5
Mark Solms; Michael Saling – A Moment of
Transition. Two Neuroscientific Articles by
Sigmund Freud – p.vii-xv;
Foreword
Mortimer Ostow

World War II, and especially the Holocaust that accompanied it,
drove the centre of ferment of psychoanalysis from Central Europe,
where it had originated, to England and the United States—the
English-speaking world. As a result it bcame necessary to provide
accurate English translations of the foundation works of
psychoanalysis, Freud's essays and books, as well as the
contributions of his disciples. These translations have been
undertaken by a series of dedicated and gifted individuals, for
whose efforts we are grateful. Of course the papers first translated
were those that bore directly upon clinical practice and its
supporting theory. Only latterly have the works of primarily
historical interest been presented to the English-speaking public.

Nevertheless, as Solms and Sating note, many of Freud's neurological works remain untranslated, so that
English readers are deprived of the opportunity to see Freud functioning as a neurologist and then turning his
interest to psychopathology, on the way to the evolution of psychoanalysis. Solms has undertaken to provide a
series of English translations of Freud's hitherto untranslated neurological papers, the first two of which are
presented in this volume. As the reader will observe, the work of translation has been carried out with an unusual
degree of meticulousness, faithfully rendering even complex thoughts into clear, lucid, unambiguous, and easily
readable English. The translator and his associate, Michael Saling, have provided also a thoroughgoing discussion
of the origin of these pre-analytical articles, what they reveal to us about the scientific climate in which Freud
worked, how his work and ideas related to those of his contemporaries, and how they can be seen as steps on the
road to the discipline of psychoanalysis. They also confront various challenges that have been posed to
psychoanalysis in recent decades, that are based upon claims that Freud was limited by the archaic and dated
views of central nervous system function that prevailed in his time. The authors demonstrate decisively Freud's
departure from the conventional wisdom and the development of his original ideas. We are treated to a view of the
thinking of the most distinguished neuropsychiatrist of history as he disappointingly comes to grips with the fact
that neurological studies offer no window onto the discipline of psychopathology. On the contrary, Freud
observed, psychological considerations must be taken into consideration in anatomical and physiological
theorizing. For example, in the 'Aphasie' article, on the basis of clinical observation of aphasic speech disorders, he
rejects the localization theories of aphasia, the concept that various 'speech centres' each controls a specific aspect
of speech, proposing instead a 'speech field', a broad area in which the operations subserving speech are carried on.
Lesions in specific regions impair those operations in some-what specific ways because they impinge upon fibres
passing through these regions, but one is not justified to infer that these regions are discrete speech centres in the
sense that they are concerned with the psychological formulation or control of speech. In this respect, Freud
anticipated important developments in twentieth-century aphasiology and is considered by the editors of this
volume to be one of the founding fathers of modern neuropsychology.

The 'Gehirn' (Brain) article demonstrates cogently Freud's dynamic mode of thinking, so that even his description
of the gross neuroanatomy of the brain takes the form of an exploration rather than a colourless exposition. I refer
to Freud as a neuropsychiatrist deliberately, because until recent decades, neurology and psychiatry were
practised by the same individual, the assumption being that knowledge of the one would facilitate the practice
of the other, and that the knowledge of brain anatomy and physiology would facilitate the practice of both.
For similar reasons, obstetrics and gynaecology are frequently practised together to this day.

Freud was a neuropsychiatrist. So was Meynert, and so was Charcot. The psychoanalytical reader will recognize
the name of Paul Flechsig, whose neuroanatomical investigations Freud quotes admiringly, as the psychiatrist who
cared for Daniel Paul Schreber. In practice, the two disciplines are approached independently. In the second half of
the nineteenth century, their interests coincided primarily in the case of dementia paralytics and of focal lesions of
the brain, traumatic, vascular, or neoplastic. In our day, psychopharmacological theory has been promising to
promote a fruitful exchange between neurophysiology and neurochemistry on the one hand, and psychiatric theory
on the other, but at this time, psycho-pharmacology remains an empirical discipline.

Sigmund Freud, like the other scholarly neuropsychiatrists of his time, seems to have been beguiled by the
hope that neuroanatomy could illuminate psychical function. He was disappointed. In the two essays in this
book I was able to find only two examples of a claimed relation between these areas. Freud, following Meynert,
calls the fibres linking parts of the cerebral cortex to each other, association fibres, 'because they serve the
association of ideas' (ibid.). Despite these exceptions. Freud seems to be giving up the hope of correlating brain
structure with mental life. He says clearly that he does not know how to relate brain function to psychical
function. We see him here cutting his psychology loose from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.
Nevertheless, in his 1891 essay on aphasia, he comes out clearly for psychophysical parallelism (see Jones, 1953, p.
403). Evidently the transition from the search for a material basis for psychological and psychopathological
phenomena to the determination to formulate a theory of mental events in their own terms was not a smooth one.
In the Cocaine Papers (Freud, 1884-87) which were written just before these two pre-analytical articles, we find
splendid clinical descriptions of the effects of cocaine and suggestions about its clinical utility, but almost no
attempt to contrive any kind of psychological description or theory. In the same encyclopedia in which these two
pre-analytical papers were published, Freud also published an article on hysteria (1888), in which he makes no
attempt to relate its symptoms to brain structure or function, although he writes that:

“Hysteria is based wholly and entirely on physiological modifications of the nervous system and its essence
should be expressed in a formula which took account of the conditions of excitability in the different parts of
the nervous system”

In 1886, Freud announced that he was preparing a paper on 'Some points for a comparative study of organic and
hysterical motor paralyses' (1893c) (Quelques considerations pour une etude comparative des paralysies motrices
organiques et hysteriques). Presumably it was written soon after the cocaine papers and almost simultaneously with
the two papers in this volume. Here he proposes perhaps the first description of what has come to be called
'structure' in psychoanalytical theory—namely, an enduring complex of psychical function, in this case, the
conception of a thing.

Meanwhile, in 1891, Waldeyer gave final form to the neurone theory. The word 'neurone' appears in Freud's 1893
paper, followed by a parenthetical definition, 'cellulo-fibrillary neural unit'. With the concept of the neurone, Freud
saw an opportunity to revive his quest to base his psychology on knowledge of the structure of the nervous
system. He forsook gross anatomy for a feature of microscopic anatomy. But he realized intermittently that
he was not building upon true anatomy and physiology, but only on a fairly gross and simplistic schematic
hypothesis.

“Anyone, however, who is engaged scientifically in the construction of hypotheses will only begin to take his
theory seriously if they can be fitted into our knowledge from more than one direction and if the arbitrariness of
a constructio ad hoc can be mitigated in relation to them.” (1895)

Freud was evidently trying to overcome his own doubts. It is not surprising therefore to learn that during the
year 1895 he alternately worked feverishly on the Project and abandoned it. Focusing on the usefulness of the
'energy' concept, Freud, in the 'Project', ignored almost completely the complex gross structure of the nervous
system, the knowledge of which he demonstrates and communicates so skilfully in Gehirn. He differentiates
between sensory and motor nerves, between the superficial and deeper layers of the cortex, and among the various
sensory reception areas (ibid., p. 315). Otherwise he treats the brain as a homogeneous structure, composed of
a collection of small objects, which he calls neurones, all of which have the same properties. He does not allow
for variation among them in these properties, nor for spontaneous activity internally generated. By discarding the
manuscript, he tried to terminate this attempt to relate psychology to brain function permanently.

The 'energy' factor has run like a red thread from Freud's earliest thoughts about psychology and psychopathology
until the last. In 'Gehirn' he speaks of the 'specific energy' of sensory nerves (p. 65, this volume). In his final and
uncompleted work on psychoanalytical theory, An Outline of Psycho-analysis (1940a), Freud wrote:

“The future may teach us to exercise a direct influence by means of particular chemical substances on the
amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus”

I believe that in that statement he was thinking back to his experiences with cocaine, restating his persistent belief
in the importance of an energy factor in psychology, and anticipating the mode of action of other
psychopharmacological agents. It is of no importance that his earliest thoughts about energy dealt with
measurable conduction processes in nerves and his later thoughts with a non-material, hypothetical parameter of
psychical function. In both instances he was concerned about motivation and its disturbances.

Meanwhile, psychoanalysis has flourished. Its theories, the fundamentals of which were established by Freud, have
been elaborated, altered and simplified, challenged and defended. Practice has changed less than theory and is
probably more consistent among different psychoanalytical communities. While in some locations the demand for
psychoanalytical treatment has diminished and authentic analysis has been displaced to some extent by
inauthentic analysis and by other therapies, psychoanalysis has contributed to a host of psychodynamic therapies,
so that its influence has grown greatly.

The dynamic that Freud saw one hundred years ago was that psychology had to be disengaged from the
anatomy and physiology that was then available and permitted to develop on its own, and then in developed
form slowly recruited to re-engage a far more subtle and sophisticated anatomy, physiology, pharmacology,
and chemistry. As he has taught us in other contexts, needs can often best be satisfied if they are temporarily
renounced. Psychoanalysis, Freud said twenty years after these papers were written,

“hopes to discover the common ground on the basis of which the convergence of physical and mental disorder
will become intelligible. With this aim in view, psychoanalysis must keep itself free from any hypothesis that is
alien to it, whether of an anatomical, chemical or physiological kind, and must operate entirely with purely
psychological auxiliary ideas.” (Freud, 1916-17, p. 211)

In these papers we see the beginning of that renunciation and disengagement; they give us a glimpse of this
crucial moment, the preparation for the application of the psycho-analytical method to the resolution of
problems of human psychology. We are impatient to initiate the process of reengagement, but it continues to
elude us.
Bibliografie 6
Michael Gazzaniga – The Mind’s Past – p.11-13
Over a hundred years ago William James lamented, “I wished by
treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become
one.”

Well, it never occurred. Psychology, which for many was the

study of mental life, gave way during the past century to other
disciplines. Today the mind sciences are the province of
evolutionary biologists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists,
psychophysicists, linguists, computer scientists—you name it.
This book is about special truths that these new practitioners of
the study of mind have unearthed.

Psychology itself is dead. Or, to put it another way, psychology is

in a funny situation. My college, Dartmouth, is constructing a
magnificent new building for psychology. Yet its four stories go
like this: The basement is all neuroscience. The first floor is
devoted to classrooms and administration. The second floor
houses social psychology, the third floor, cognitive science, and
the fourth, cognitive neuroscience. Why is it called the psychology
building?

Traditions are long lasting and hard to give up. The odd thing is that everyone but its practitioners knows about
the death of psychology. A dean asked the development office why money could not be raised to reimburse the
college for the new psychology building. “Oh, the alumni think it’s a dead topic, you know, sort of just counseling. If
those guys would call themselves the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, I could raise $25 million in a week.”
The grand questions originally asked by those trained in classical psychology have evolved into matters other
scientists can address. My dear friend the late Stanley Schachter of Columbia University told me just before his
death that his beloved field of social psychology was not, after all, a cumulative science. Yes, scientists keep
asking questions and using the scientific method to answer them, but the answers don’t point to a body of
knowledge where one result leads to another. It was a strong statement—one that he would be the first to qualify.
But he was on to something. The field of psychology is not the field of molecular biology, where new discoveries
building on old ones are made every day. This is not to say that psychological processes and psychological states
are uninteresting, even boring, subjects.

On the contrary, they are fascinating pieces of the mysterious unknown that many curious minds struggle to
understand. How the brain enables mind is the question to be answered in the twenty-first century—no doubt about
it.

The next question is how to think about this question. That is the business of this little book. I think the message
here is significant, one important enough to be held up for examination if it is to take hold. My view of how the brain
works is rooted in an evolutionary perspective that moves from the fact that our mental life reflects the actions of
many, perhaps dozens to thousands, of neural devices that are built into our brains at the factory. These devices do
crucial things for us, from managing our walking and breathing to helping us with syllogisms.
There are all kinds and shapes of neural devices, and they are all clever.

At first it is hard to believe that most of these devices do their jobs before we are aware of their actions. We human
beings have a centric view of the world. We think our personal selves are directing the show most of the time. I
argue that recent research shows this is not true but simply appears to be true because of a special device in our left
brain called the interpreter. This one device creates the illusion that we are in charge of our actions, and it does so
by interpreting our past—the prior actions of our nervous system.

Bibliografie 7
J. Graham Beaumont – Introduction to
Neuropsychology, Second Edition, p.3-8;
What is Neuropsychology?

The human brain is a fascinating and engimatic machine. Weighing

only about 3 pounds (1.36 kilograms) and with a volume of about 1,250
cubic centimeters, it has the ability to monitor and control our basic
life support systems, to maintain our posture and direct our
movements, to receive and interpret information about the world
around us, and to store information in a readily accessible form
throughout our lives. It allows us to solve problems that range from
the strictly practical to the highly abstract, to communicate with our
fellow human beings through language, to create new ideas and
imagine things that have never existed, to feel love and happiness and
disappointment, and to experience an awareness of ourselves as
individuals. Not only can the brain undertake such a variety of
different functions, but it can do more or less all of them
simultaneously. How this is achieved is one of the most challenging
and exciting problems faced by contemporary science.

It has to be said at the outset that we are completely ignorant of many of the things that the brain does, and
of how they are done. Nevertheless, very considerable advances have been made in the neurosciences over the
last decade or two, and there is growing confidence among neuroscientists that a real understanding is beginning
to emerge. This feeling is encouraged by the increasing integration of the various disciplines involved in
neuroscience, and a convergence of both experimental findings and theoretical models.

Neuropsychology, as one of the neurosciences, has grown to be a separate field of specialization within
psychology over about the last 40 years, although there has always been an interest in it throughout the 120-
year history of modern scientific psychology. Neuropsychology seeks to understand the relationship between the
brain and behavior, that is, it attempts to explain the way in which the activity of the brain is expressed in observable
behavior. What mechanisms are responsible for human thinking, learning, and emotion, how do these mechanisms
operate, and what are the effects of changes in brain states upon human behavior? There are a variety of ways in
which neuropsychologists conduct their investigations into such questions, but the central theme of each is
that to understand human behavior we need to understand the human brain. A psychology without any
reference to physiology can hardly be complete. The operation of the brain is relevant to human conduct, and the
understanding of how the brain relates to behavior may make a significant contribution to understanding how
other, more purely psychological, factors operate in directing behavior. Just how the brain deals with intelligent
and complex human functions is, in any case, an important subject of investigation in its own right, and one that
has an immediate relevance for those with brain injuries and diseases, as well as a wider relevance for medical
practice.

BRANCHES OF NEUROPSYCHOLOGY

Neuropsychology is often divided into two main areas: clinical neuropsychology and experimental
neuropsychology. The distinction is principally between clinical studies, on brain-injured subjects, and experimental
studies, on normal subjects, although the methods of investigation also differ. The division between the two is not
absolutely clear-cut but it helps to form an initial classification of the kinds of work in which neuropsychologists are
involved.

Clinical neuropsychology deals with patients who have lesions of the brain. These lesions may be the effects of
disease or tumors, may result from physical damage or trauma to the brain, or be the result of other biochemical
changes, perhaps caused by toxic substances. Trauma may be accidental, caused by wounds or collisions; it may
result from some failure in the vascular system supplying blood to the brain; or it may be the intended result of
neurosurgical intervention to correct some neurological problem. The clinical neuropsychologist measures deficits
in intelligence, personality, and sensory–motor functions by specialized testing procedures, and relates the results
to the particular areas of the brain that have been affected. The damaged areas may be clearly circumscribed and
limited in extent, particularly in the case of surgical lesions (when an accurate description of the parts of the brain
that have been removed can be obtained), or may be diffuse, affecting cells throughout much of the brain, as is the
case with certain cerebral diseases. Clinical neuropsychologists employ these measurements not only in the
scientific investigation of brain–behavior relationships, but also in the practical clinical work of aiding diagnosis of
brain lesions and rehabilitating brain-injured patients.

Behavioral neurology, as a form of clinical neuropsychology, also deals with clinical patients, but the emphasis is
upon conceptual rather than operational definitions of behavior. The individual case rather than group statistics is
the focus of attention, and this approach usually involves less formal tests to establish qualitative deviations from
“normal” functioning. Studies in behavioral neurology may often sample broader aspects of behavior than is usual
in clinical neuropsychology. The distinction between clinical neuropsychology and behavioral neurology is not
entirely clear, and it is further blurred by the historical traditions of investigation in different countries,
particularly in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Great Britain. Examples of clinical work in these
countries are discussed below and in Chapter 15. By contrast, experimental neuropsychologists work with normal
subjects with intact brains. This is the most recent area of neuropsychology to develop and has grown rapidly since
the 1960s, with the invention of a variety of techniques that can be employed in the laboratory to study higher
functions in the brain. There are close links between experimental neuropsychology and general experimental and
cognitive psychology, and the laboratory methods employed in these three areas have strong similarities. Subjects
are generally required to undertake performance tasks while their accuracy or speed of response is recorded, from
which inferences about brain organization can be made. Associated variables, including psychophysiological or
electrophysiological variables, may also be recorded.

COMPARATIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY

Although the subject of this book is human neuropsychology, it should not be forgotten that much experimental
neuropsychology has been conducted with animals, although this form of research is now in decline. At one time,
the term neuropsychology was in fact taken to refer to this area, but it is now used more generally and the relative
importance of the animal studies of comparative neuropsychology has decreased. The obvious advantage of
working with animals, ethical issues apart, is that precise lesions can be introduced into the brain and later
confirmed by histology. Changes in the animal’s behavior are observed and can be correlated with the
experimental lesions. The disadvantages are the problems of investigating high-level functions using animals as
subjects (the study of language is ruled out, to take the most obvious example) and the difficulty of generalizing
from the animal brain to the human brain. Although it may be possible to discover in great detail how some
perceptual function is undertaken in the brain of the rat, the cat, or the monkey, it may not necessarily be
undertaken in the same way in the human brain. There are also basic differences in the amount and distribution of
different types of cortical tissue in the brains of the various animals and of humans, which add to the difficulties of
generalization.

Nevertheless, animal studies continue to be important, particularly with regard to the functions of subcortical
systems—those functions located in the structures below the surface mantle of the brain that deal with relatively
basic aspects of sensation, perception, learning, memory, and emotion. These systems are harder to study in
humans, because damage to these regions may interfere much more radically with a whole range of behaviors,
and may often result in death. One of the problems facing contemporary neuropsychology is to integrate the
study of cortical functions and higher-level behaviors, which have generally been studied in humans, with the study
of subcortical structures and more basic behavioral systems, which have been studied in animals. These have
tended to be separate areas of research, although there are now signs of integration between the two. For example,
intelligence is now being discussed not just in terms of human performance on intelligence tests, but also in terms
of underlying basic processes of learning, attention, and motivation that are only understood, in
neuropsychological terms, from animal studies. Sexual behavior is another area where the basic systems are only
open to experimental study in animals, yet must be viewed within the context of socialized and cognitively
controlled behavior in humans.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

Neuropsychology suffers philosophical and conceptual difficulties no less than other areas of psychology, and
perhaps more than many. There are two problems in particular of which every student of the subject should be
aware.

1.The first of these springs from the nature of the methods that must be used in neuropsychological
investigation. Descriptions of brain organization can only be relatively distant inferences from the human
performance that is actually observed. The real states of the brain are not observed. Behavioral measures are taken,
and by a line of reasoning that is based on background information about either the general arrangement of the
brain (in the case of experimental neuropsychology) or about the gross changes in the brain of a particular type of
patient (in the case of clinical neuropsychology), conclusions are drawn about what the correlation must be
between brain states and behavior. The one exception to this general rule is in electrophysiological studies and
studies of cerebral blood flow and metabolism through advanced scanning techniques, where actual brain states
can be observed, albeit rather crudely, in “real time” alongside the human performance being measured. This
makes these studies of special importance in neuropsychology.

However, in general, neuropsychological study proceeds only by inference. It is important to remember this in
assessing the validity of many of the findings claimed by neuropsychologists, and also to be particularly vigilant
that the reasoning used in drawing inferences is soundly based and the data not open to alternative
explanations.

2.The second problem is even more fundamental, and is that usually referred to as the mind–body problem. It is
a subject far too complex to receive satisfactory treatment here, but in brief it is concerned with the philosophical
difficulties that arise when we talk about mental events or “mind,” and physiological events or “body,” and try to
relate the two. We first have to decide whether mind and body are, or are not, fundamentally different kinds
of things. If they are, then there are problems in giving explanations that correlate the two. If they are not, then
we have to be careful not to be misled by our everyday language and concepts, which tend to treat mind and body
as if they were different kinds of things. The debate has gone on for some centuries, and is far from being
resolved, but there is a general position accepted by most if not all neuropsychologists. This position is known
as “emergent materialism” or “emergent psychoneural monism.” It rejects the idea that mind and body are
fundamentally different (hence it is “monist” rather than “dualist”) and proposes that all mental states are
states of the brain. Mental events therefore exist, but are not separate entities. However, mental states cannot
be reduced to a set of physical states because the brain is not a physical machine but a biosystem, and so
possesses properties peculiar to living things. The brain is seen as not simply a complex composition of cells, but
as having a structure and an environment. The result is that there are “emergent” properties that include being
able to think and feel and perceive. These properties are emergent just as the sweetness of an apple is an
emergent property. There is nothing in the chemistry or physical structure of the apple that possesses sweetness.
It is the whole object, in interaction with the eater, that produces the quality of sweetness. Mind is therefore seen
as a collection of emergent bioactivities, and this has implications for both theories and methods in
neuropsychology. It means that it is sometimes quite proper and sensible to reduce explanations to lower levels of
description, purely in terms of the physiology or the biochemistry involved. However, it also means that integration
among these lower processes and their description in terms of higher level concepts (concerning the emergent
properties) are both feasible and valuable.

The student first taking an interest in neuropsychology should not be overly concerned about these philosophical
issues; much, if not most, of neuropsychological work is conducted while ignoring them altogether. However, some
position is always implied in any investigation or theoretical model, and it is wise not to lose sight of the
implications of holding a particular position for a satisfactory understanding of how the brain works.

Bibliografie 8

Leon Dănăilă; Mihai Golu – Tratat de

neuropsihologie, volumul 1, p.17-19; 21;
Capitolul I
RAPORTUL PSIHIC-CREIER

Indiferent dacă definirea neuropsihologiei are un caracter mai

restrâns sau mai extins, domeniul ei specific de studiu rămâne
tot raportul psihic-creier. Principala sa finalitate
epistemologică rezidă tocmai în elucidarea, pe baze
experimentale şi clinice, a naturii şi esenţei acestui raport în
jurul căruia, în istoria gândirii filosofice şi ştiinţifice, au existat
aprinse dispute şi controverse. Trebuie subliniat că dacă
problema originii şi naturii psihicului s-a conştientizat şi a
devenit obiect de preocupare intelectuală din cele mai vechi
timpuri, de când omul a dobândit conştiinţă de sine, studiul
organizării structural-funcţionale a creierului a intrat mult mai
târziu în circuitul epistemologic. Evidenţierea şi afirmarea
legăturii celor două entităţi - psihicul şi creierul - se realizează abia în antichitatea târzie, doar cu câteva secole
înaintea erei noastre. Până atunci, cea mai inrădăcinată era convingerea că sufletul este un atribut al întregului corp,
mecanismul „dinamizării" şi „primenirii" lui fiind considerat actul respiraţiei sau circulaţia sângelui. Chiar în secolul
V a.e.n. , Hippocrate şi Kroton implicau creierul numai în realizarea gândirii, procesele şi stările afective fiind puse
pe seama aparatului cardiovascular.

De-abia în secolul II î.e.n., Galen a făcut un pas mai serios înainte, afirmând într-o formă mai explicită şi mai
completă existenţa unei legături permanente între viaţa psihică internă şi creier. El formulează pentru prima dată
ipoteza localizării directe a funcţiilor şi proceselor psihice în structurile cerebrale.
Astfel, considerând că impresiile din lumea externă pătrund în forma fluidelor, prin ochi, în ventriculii cerebrali,
acest gânditor propunea că talamusul optic reprezintă acel mecanism în care fluidele respective se asociază cu
fluidele vitale sosite din ficat, transformându-se, la nivelul sistemului vascular, în fluide psihice (pneuma psihikon
sau pneuma loghistikon). Pe cât de naivă şi puerilă ne pare astăzi această explicaţie, pe atât de avansată şi
revoluţionară a fost ea pentru timpul acela. De altfel, ideea că ventriculii cerebrali (mai exact, lichidul care-i irigă)
constituie substratul material nemijlocit al psihicului s-a perpetuat mai bine de un mileniu şi jumătate. Modul de
abordare şi soluţionare ulterioară a problemei raportului dintre psihic şi creier a fost condiţionat atât de evoluţia
reprezentărilor şi testărilor psihologice, cat şi de perfecţionarea metodelor şi tehnicilor de investigare şi descriere
anatomofiziologică a sistemului nervos. În general, reprezentările şi teoriile psihologice, evoluand în cadrul
diferitelor sisteme filosofice s-au detașat tot mai mult de suportul lor intuitiv-concret iniţial, dobândind un caracter
speculativ-abstract. Chiar în aceste condiţii, viaţa psihică a omului nu va mai fi însă abordată global, ca ceva
amorf, ci va fi supusă operaţiei de analiză şi clasificare, care va duce la desprinderea şi descrierea unor funcţii
precise şi capacităţi particulare distincte.

Cât priveşte cunoaşterea sistemului nervos, ea va continua încă multă vreme să se menţină la un nivel vag,
ipotetic, lipsită de un material faptic dobândit prin metode ştiinţifice riguroase. Aceasta a făcut ca raportarea
psihicului la substratul neuronal să fie concepută tot într-o manieră globală, fenomenologică.

Iată, de pildă, chiar în secolul al XVII-lea, Descartes (1649) considera posibil ca întregul psihic să fie localizat într-un
singur organ – glanda epifiză (pineală) – situată central la baza emisferelor cerebrale, poziție care îi conferea, în
opinia lui, roul de dispecer al “spiritelor animale”, purtătoarele nemijlocite ale psihicului. Willis (1664) susținea că
organul vieții psihice este reprezentat de corpii striați. Mai târziu, Lancisi (1739), lega procesele psihice de corpul
calos.

Tendința de a localiza fiecare funcție psihică, oricât de complexă, într-o zonă precis delimitată a creierului atinge
punctul ei culminant la anatomistul austriac Franz Gall (1810), care avansează ideea că scoarța cerebrală e un strat
de centri integratori, fiecare dintre ei îndeplinind o anumită funcție psihică. Trebuie menționat că, în pofida
caracterului ei exagerat și esențialmente naiv, concepția lui Gall prezină din perspectiva actuală o dublă importanță
metodologică:

1.atrage pentru prima oară atenția asupra caracterului diferențiat al scoarței cerebrale, într-o epocă în care
aceasta continua să fie considerată o masă amorfă

2.ideile despre centrii corticali înalt specializați în plan funcțional au avut o influență deosebită asupra
constituirii modulului îngust localizaționist de mai târziu, având ecouri până în neuroștiința cognitivă
contemporană.

Reținem ca semnificativ faptul că prima modalitate de a rezolva problema raportului psihic-creier s-a concretizat în
tendința de a localiza funcțiile și procesele psihice particulare în structuri și formațiuni cerebrale cât mai exact
delimitate anatomic. Această tendință va fi continuată de cercetările anatomo-patologice realizate de Paul Broca
și, mai târziu, de Carl Wernicke. Primul a pus în evidență într-o manieră concludentă legătura diferențiat-selectivă
între un focar patologic al creierului și tulburarea unei anumite funcții psihice. Astfel, analizând postmortem
creierele a doi pacienți care decedeaseră prezentând grave tulburări ale vorbirii (afazie motorie), Broca (1861, 1865)
a descoperit existența unei leziuni a porțiunii posterioare a circumvoluțiunii frontale inferioare din emisfera stângă.
Pe această bază, el a formulat concluzia potrivit căreia vorbirea are o localizare precisă, zona descrisă de el putând
fi denumită “centrul imaginii motorii ale cuvintelor”. În finalul raportului său, prezentat în cadrul Societății de
Antropologie din Paris, Broca își exprima optimist speranța că, în viitor vor fi descoperiți centrii și pentru celelalte
funcții psihice superioare, ideea localizaționismului îngust dobândind astfel o acceptare pe scară largă în neurologia
epocii. Fapt este că descoperirile lui Broca au dat un puternic impuls investigațiilor clinice asupra tulburărilor de
focar, care vor avea un rol esențial în constituirea și dezvoltarea neuropsihologiei moderne.

Rezumând, putem spune că orientarea neuroanatomică localizaționistă susține următoarele teze principale:
funcțiile psihice au o reprezentare corticală separată, legându-se prin fascicule de substanță albă, acestea
putând fi constituite din subfascicule care fac posibil transferul unui anumit tip de informație în diferite
“puncte” ale creierului. Cu toate acestea, în ciuda inițialei sale solidități experimentale, modelul îngust
localizaționist nu a putut dobândi în cele din urmă o recunoaștere unanimă.

Bibliografie 9

Todd E. Feinberg; Martha J. Farah –

Behavioral Neurology and
Neuropsychology, p.14-16;
The Rise of Experimental Neuropsychology

Most of the advances described so far in this chapter were

made by studying individual patients, or at most a small
series of patients with similar disorders. In many instances,
particularly before the middle of this century, patients'
behavior was studied relatively naturalistically, without
planned protocols or quantitative measurements. In the
1960s and 70s, a different approach to the study of brain-
behavior relations took hold. Neurologists and
neuropsychologists began to design experiments
patterned on research methods in experimental
psychology.

Typical research designs in experimental psychology involved groups of normal subjects given different
experimental treatments (for example, different training or different stimulus materials), and the effects of the
treatments were measured in standardized protocols and compared using statistical methods such as analysis of
variance (ANOVA). In neuropsychology, the "treatments" were, as a rule, naturally occurring brain lesions.
Groups of patients with different lesion sites or behavioral syndromes were tested with standard protocols,
yielding quantitative measures of performance, and these performances were compared across patient groups
and with non-brain-damaged control groups. Unlike the impairments studied previously in single-case designs,
which were so striking that control subjects would generally have been superfluous, experimental
neuropsychology often focused on group differences of a rather subtle nature, which required statistical
analysis to substantiate.

The most common question addressed by these studies concerned localization of function. Often the localization
sought was no more precise than left versus right hemisphere or one quadrant of the brain (which, in the days
before computed tomography, often amounted to left versus right hemisphere with presence or absence of visual
field defects and/or hemiplegia). Given the huge amount of research done during this period on language,
memory, perception, attention, emotion, praxis, and so-called executive functions, it would be hopeless
even to attempt a summary.
The influential research program of the Montreal Neurological Institute also began during this period. In the wake
of William Scoville's discovery that the bilateral medial temporal resection he performed on epileptic patient H.M.
resulted in permanent and dense amnesia, Brenda Milner and her colleagues investigated this patient and groups
of other operated epileptic patients. This enabled them to address questions of functional localization with the
anatomic precision of known surgical lesions. At the same time, another surgical intervention for epilepsy,
callosotomy, also spawned a productive and influential research program. Roger Sperry and his students and
collaborators were able to address a wide variety of questions about hemispheric specialization by studying the
isolated functioning of the human cerebral hemispheres.

In addition to answering questions about localization, the experimental neuropsychology of the sixties and
seventies also uncovered aspects of the functional organization of behavior. By examining patterns of association
and dissociation among abilities over groups of subjects, researchers tried to determine which abilities depend
on the same underlying functional systems and which are functionally independent. For example, the
frequent association of aphasia and apraxia had been taken by some to support the notion that aphasia was not
language-specific but was just one manifestation of a more pervasive loss of the ability to symbolize or represent
("asymbolia"). A classic group study by Goodglass and Kaplan undermined this position by showing that severity
of apraxia and aphasia were uncorrelated in a large sample of left-hemisphere-damaged subjects. A second
example of the use of dissociations between groups of patients from this period is the demonstration of the
functional distinction, by Newcombe and Russell, within vision between pattern recognition and spatial
orientation.

By the end of the seventies, experimental neuropsychology had matured to the point where many perceptual,
cognitive, and motor abilities bad been associated with particular brain regions, mod certain features of the
functional organization of these abilities had been delineated. Accordingly, it was at this time that first editions
of some at the best-known neuropsychology texts appeared, such as those by Hecaen and Albert, Heilman and
Valenstein, Kolb and Whishaw, Springer and Deutsch, and Walsh.

Despite the tremendous progress of this period, experimental neuropsychology remained distinct from and
relatively unknown within academic psychology. Particularly in the United States, but also to a large extent in
Canada and Europe (the three largest contributors to the world's psychology literature), experimental
neuropsychologists tended to work in medical centers rather than university psychology departments and
to publish their work in journals separate from mainstream experimental psychology. An important turning
point in the histories of both neuropsychology and the psychology of normal human function came when
researchers in each area became aware of the other.

THE MARRIAGE OF EXPERIMENTAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

The predominant approach to human experimental psychology in the 1970s was cognitive psychology. The
hallmark of this approach was the assumption that all of cognition (broadly construed to include perception and
motor control) could be viewed as information processing. Although the effects of damage to an information-
processing mechanism might seem to be a good source of clues as to its normal operation, cognitive
psychologists of the seventies were generally quite ignorant of contemporary neuropsychology.

The reason that most cognitive psychologists of the 1970s ignored neuropsychology stemmed from an overly
narrow conception of information processing, based on the digital computer. A basic tenet of cognitive
psychology was the computer analogy for the mind: the mind is to the brain as software is to hardware in a
computer. Given that the same computer can run different programs and the same program can be run on
different computers, this analogy suggests that hardware and software are independent and that the brain is
therefore irrelevant to cognitive psychology. If you want to understand the nature of the program that is the
human mind, studying neuropsychology is as pointless as trying to understand how a computer is programmed
by looking at the circuit boards.

The problem with the computer analogy is that hardware and software are independent only for very special
types of computational systems: those systems that have been engineered, through great effort and
ingenuity, to make the hardware and software independent, enabling one computer to run many programs and
enabling those programs to be portable to other computers. The brain was "designed" by very different
pressures, and there is no reason to believe that, in general, information-processing functions and the
physical subtrate of those functions will be independent. In fact, as cognitive psychologists finally began to
learn about neuropsychology, it became apparent that cognitive functions break down in characteristic and highly
informative ways after brain damage. By the early 1980s, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology were finally
in communication with one another. Since then, we have seen an explosion of meetings, books, and new journals
devoted to so-called cognitive neuropsychology. Perhaps more important, existing cognitive psychology journals
have begun to publish neuropsychological studies, and articles in existing neuropsychology and neurology
journals frequently include discussions of the cognitive psychology literature.

Let us take a closer look at the scientific forces that drove this change in disciplinary boundaries. By 1980, both
cognitive psychology and neuropsychology had reached stages of development that were, if not exactly
impasses, points of diminishing returns for the concepts and methods of their own isolated disciplines. In
cognitive psychology, the problem concerned methodologic limitations. By varying stimuli and instructions and
measuring responses and response latencies, cognitive psychologists made inferences about the information
processing that intervened between stimulus and response. But such inferences were indirect, and in some cases
they were incapable of distinguishing between rival theories. In 1978 the cognitive psychologist John Anderson
published an influential paper in which he called this the "identifiability" problem and took as his example the
debate over whether mental images were more like perceptual representations or linguistic representations. He
argued that the field's inability to resolve this issue, despite many years of research, was due to the impossibility
of uniquely identifying internal cognitive processes from stimulus-response relations. He suggested that the
direct study of brain function could, in principle, make a unique identification possible, but he indicated that such
a solution probably lay in the distant future.

That distant future came to pass within the next 10 years, as cognitive psychologists working on a variety of
different topics found that the study of neurologic patients provided a powerful new source of evidence for testing
their theories. In the case of mental imagery, taken by Anderson to be emblematic of the identifiability problem,
the finding that perceptual impairments after brain damage were frequently accompanied by parallel imagery
impairments strongly favored the perceptual hypothesis. The study of learning and memory within cognitive
psychology was revolutionized by the influx of ideas and findings on preserved learning in amnesia, leading to the
hypothesis of multiple memory systems.

In the study of attention, cognitive psychologists had for years focused on the issue of early versus late attentional
selection without achieving a resolution, and here too neurologic disorders were crucial in moving the field
forward. The phenomena of neglect provided dramatic evidence of selection from spatially formatted perceptual
representations, and the variability in neglect manifestations from case to case helped to establish the possibility
of multiple loci for attentional selection as opposed to a single early or late locus. The idea of separate visual
feature maps, supported by cases of acquired color, motion, and depth blindness, provided the inspiration for the
most novel development in recent cognitive theories of attention—namely, feature integration theory.

What did neuropsychology gain from the rapprochement with cognitive psychology? The main benefits were
theoretical rather than methodologic. Traditionally, neuropsychologists studied the localization and functional
organization of abilities, such as speech, reading, memory, object recognition, and so forth. But few would doubt
that each of these abilities depends upon an orchestrated set of component cognitive processes, and it seems far
more likely that the underlying cognitive components, rather than the task-defined abilities, are what is
implemented in localized neural tissue. The theories of cognitive psychology therefore allowed
neuropsychologists to pose questions about the localization and functional organization of the components
of the cognitive architecture, a level of theoretical analysis that was more likely to yield clear and
generalizable findings.

Among patients with reading disorders, for example, some are impaired at reading nonwords (e.g., plif) while
others are impaired at reading irregular words (e.g., yacht). Rather than attempt to localize nonword reading
or irregular word reading per se and delineate them as independent abilities, neuropsychologists have been able
to use a theory of reading developed in cognitive psychology to interpret these disorders in terms of damage
to a whole-word recognition system and a grapheme-to-phoneme translation system, respectively. This
interpretation has the advantage of correctly predicting additional features of patient behavior, such as the
tendency to misread nonwords as words of overall similar appearance when operating with only the whole-
word system.

In recent years the neurology and neuropsychology of every major cognitive system has adopted the theoretical
framework of cognitive psychology in a general way, and in some cases specific theories have been incorporated.
This is reflected in the content and organization of the present book. For the most intensively studied areas of
behavioral neurology and neuropsycholohgy—namely, visual attention, memory, language, frontal lobe function,
and Alzheimer disease—integrated pairs of chapters review the clinical and anatomic aspects of the relevant
disorders and their cognitive theoretical interpretations. Chapters on other topics will cover both the clinical and
theoretical aspects together.

Bibliografie 10
Christian Jarett – Great Myths of the Brain,
p.1-15; 101-106;
Introduction

“As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, we can

study Particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked
the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our
ears.” That was US President Barack Obama speaking in April
2013 at the launch of the multimillion dollar BRAIN Initiative. It
stands for “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies” and the idea is to develop new ways to
visualize the brain in action. The same year the EU announced its
own €1 billion Human Brain Project to create a computer model
of the brain.

This focus on neuroscience isn’t new – back in 1990, US President

George H.W. Bush designated the 1990s the “Decade of the
Brain” with a series of public awareness publications and events.
Since then interest and investment in neuroscience has only
grown more intense; some have even spoken of the twenty-first
century as the “Century of the Brain.” Despite our passion for all
things neuro, Obama’s assessment of our current knowledge was accurate. We’ve made great strides in our
understanding of the brain, yet huge mysteries remain. They say a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing and
it is in the context of this excitement and ignorance that brain myths have thrived. By brain myths I mean stories
and misconceptions about the brain and brain-related illness, some so entrenched in everyday talk that large
sections of the population see them as taken-for-granted facts.

With so many misconceptions swirling around, it’s increasingly difficult to tell proper neuroscience from brain
mythology or what one science blogger calls neurobollocks (see neurobollocks.wordpress.com), otherwise known
as neurohype, neurobunk, neurotrash, or neurononsense. Daily newspaper headlines tell us the “brain spot” for
this or that emotion has been identified. Salesmen are capitalizing on the fashion for brain science by placing
the neuro prefix in front of any activity you can think of, from neuroleadership to neuromarketing (see p. 188).
Fringe therapists and selfhelp gurus borrow freely from neuroscience jargon, spreading a confusing mix of brain
myths and self-improvement propaganda.

In 2014, a journalist and over-enthusiastic neuroscientist even attempted to explain the Iranian nuclear negotiations
(occurring at that time) in terms of basic brain science. Writing in The Atlantic, the authors actually made some
excellent points, especially in terms of historical events and people’s perceptions of fairness. But they undermined
their own credibility by labeling these psychological and historical insights as neuroscience, or by gratuitously
referencing the brain. It’s as if the authors drank brain soup before writing their article, and just as they were
making an interesting historical or political point, they hiccupped out another nonsense neuro reference. This book
takes you on a tour of the most popular, enduring and dangerous of brain myths and misconceptions, from the
widely accepted notion that we use just 10 percent of our brains, to more specific and harmful misunderstandings
about brain illnesses, such as the mistaken idea that you should place an object in the mouth of a person having
an epileptic fit to stop them from swallowing their tongue. I’ll show you examples of writers, filmmakers, and
charlatans spreading brain myths in newspaper headlines and the latest movies. I’ll investigate the myths’ origins
and do my best to use the latest scientific consensus to explain the truth about how the brain really works.

The Urgent Need for Neuro Myth-Busting

When Sanne Dekker at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and her colleagues surveyed hundreds of British and
Dutch teachers recently about common brain myths pertaining to education, their results were alarming. The
teachers endorsed around half of 15 neuromyths embedded among 32 statements about the brain. What’s more,
these weren’t just any teachers. They were teachers recruited to the survey because they had a particular interest
in using neuroscience to improve teaching. Among the myths the teachers endorsed were the idea that there
are left-brain and right-brain learners and that physical coordination exercises can improve the integration of
function between the brain hemispheres. Worryingly, myths related to quack brain-based teaching were
especially likely to be endorsed by the teachers. Most disconcerting of all, greater general knowledge about the
brain was associated with stronger belief in educational neuromyths – another indication that a little brain
knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

If the people educating the next generation are seduced by brain myths, it’s a sure sign that we need to do more to
improve the public’s understanding of the difference between neurobunk and real neuroscience. Still further
reason to tackle brain myths head on comes from research showing that presenting people, including
psychology students, with correct brain information is not enough – many still endorse the 10 percent myth
and others. Instead what’s needed is a “refutational approach” that first details brain myths and then debunks
them, which is the format I’ll follow through much of this book. Patricia Kowalski and Annette Taylor at the
University of San Diego compared the two teaching approaches in a 2009 study with 65 undergraduate psychology
students. They found that directly refuting brain and psychology myths, compared with simply presenting
accurate facts, significantly improved the students’ performance on a test of psychology facts and fiction at
the end of the semester. Post-semester performance for all students had improved by 34.3 percent, compared
with 53.7 for those taught by the refutational approach.

Yet another reason it’s important we get myth-busting is the media’s treatment of neuroscience. When Clíodhna
O'Connor at UCL’s Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, and her colleagues analyzed UK press coverage
of brain research from 2000 to 2010, they found that newspapers frequently misappropriated new neuroscience
findings to bolster their own agenda, often perpetuating brain myths in the process (we’ll see through examples
later in this book that the US press is guilty of spreading neuromyths too). From analyzing thousands of news
articles about the brain, O’Connor found a frequent habit was for journalists to use a fresh neuroscience finding as
the basis for generating new brain myths – dubious self improvement or parenting advice, say, or an alarmist
health warning. Another theme was using neuroscience to bolster group differences, for example, by referring to
“the female brain” or “the gay brain,” as if all people fitting that identity all have the same kind of brain.
“[Neuroscience] research was being applied out of context to create dramatic headlines, push thinly disguised
ideological arguments, or support particular policy agendas,” O’Connor and her colleagues concluded.

The need for humility to debunk misconceptions about the brain and present the truth about how the brain really
works, I’ve pored over hundreds of journal articles, consulted the latest reference books and in some cases made
direct contact with the world’s leading experts. I have strived to be as objective as possible, to review the evidence
without a pre-existing agenda. However, anyone who spends time researching brain myths soon discovers that
many of today’s myths were yesterday’s facts. I am presenting you with an account based on the latest
contemporary evidence, but I do so with humility, aware that the facts may change and that people make mistakes.
While the scientific consensus may evolve, what is timeless is to have a skeptical, open-minded approach, to
judge claims on the balance of evidence, and to seek out the truth for its own sake, not in the service of some
other agenda.

Before finishing this Introduction with a primer on basic brain anatomy, I’d like to share with you a contemporary
example of the need for caution and humility in the field of brain mythology. Often myths arise because a single
claim or research finding has particular intuitive appeal. The claim makes sense, it supports a popular argument,
and soon it is cemented as taken-for-granted fact even though its evidence base is weak. This is exactly what
happened in recent years with the popular idea, accepted and spread by many leading neuroscientists, that colorful
images from brain scans are unusually persuasive and beguiling. Yet new evidence suggests this is a modern brain
myth. Two researchers in this area, Martha Farah and Cayce Hook, call this irony the “seductive allure of ‘seductive
allure.’” Brain scan images have been described as seductive since at least the 1990s and today virtually every
cultural commentary on neuroscience mentions the idea that they paralyze our usual powers of rational scrutiny.

Consider an otherwise brilliant essay that psychologist Gary Marcus wrote for the New Yorker late in 2012 about the
rise of neuroimaging: “Fancy color pictures of brains in action became a fixture in media accounts of the human
mind and lulled people into a false sense of comprehension,” he said. Earlier in the year, Steven Poole writing for
the New Statesman put it this way: “the [fMRI] pictures, like religious icons, inspire uncritical devotion.”

What’s the evidence for the seductive power of brain images? It mostly hinges on two key studies. In 2008, David
McCabe and Alan Castel showed that undergraduate participants found the conclusions of a study (watching TV
boosts maths ability) more convincing when accompanied by an fMRI brain scan image than by a bar chart or an
EEG scan. The same year, Deena Weisberg and her colleagues published evidence that naïve adults and
neuroscience students found bad psychological explanations more satisfying when they contained gratuitous
neuroscience information (their paper was titled “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations”).

What’s the evidence against the seductive power of brain images? First off, Farah and Hook criticize the 2008
McCabe study. McCabe’s group claimed that the different image types were “informationally equivalent,” but
Farah and Hook point out this isn’t true – the fMRI brain scan images are unique in providing the specific shape and
location of activation in the temporal lobe, which was relevant information for judging the study.

Next came a study published in 2012 by David Gruber and Jacob Dickerson, who found that the presence of brain
images did not affect students’ ratings of the credibility of science news stories. Was this failure to replicate the
seductive allure of brain scans an anomaly? Far from it. Through 2013 no fewer than three further investigations
found the same or a similar null result. This included a paper by Hook and Farah themselves, involving 988
participants across three experiments; and another led by Robert Michael involving 10 separate replication
attempts and nearly 2000 participants. Overall, Michael’s team found that the presence of a brain scan had only
a tiny effect on people’s belief in an accompanying story. The result shows “the ‘amazingly persistent meme of the
overly influential image’ has been wildly overstated,” they concluded. So why have so many of us been seduced by
the idea that brain scan images are powerfully seductive? Farah and Hook say the idea supports non-scanning
psychologists’ anxieties about brain scan research stealing all the funding. Perhaps above all, it just seems so
plausible. Brain scan images really are rather pretty, and the story that they have a powerful persuasive effect is
very believable. Believable, but quite possibly wrong.

Brain scans may be beautiful but the latest evidence suggests they aren’t as beguiling as we once assumed.
It’s a reminder that in being skeptical about neuroscience we must be careful not to create new brain myths of our
own.

Arm Yourself against Neurobunk

This book will guide you through many of the most popular and pervasive neuromyths but more are appearing every
day. To help you tell fact from fiction when encountering brain stories in the news or on TV, here are six simple tips
to follow:

1.Look out for gratuitous neuro references. Just because someone mentions the brain it doesn’t necessarily make
their argument more valid. Writing in The Guardian in 2013, clinical neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell called out a
politician who claimed recently that unemployment is a problem because it has “physical effects on the brain,” as
if it isn’t an important enough issue already for social and practical reasons. This is an example of the mistaken
idea that a neurological reference somehow lends greater authority to an argument, or makes a societal or
behavioral problem somehow more real. You’re also likely to encounter newspaper stories that claim a particular
product or activity really is enjoyable or addictive or harmful because of a brain scan study showing the activation
of reward pathways or some other brain change. Anytime someone is trying to convince you of something, ask
yourself – does the brain reference add anything to what we already knew? Does it really make the argument
more truthful?

2.Look for conflicts of interest. Many of the most outrageous and farfetched brain stories are spread by people
with an agenda. Perhaps they have a book to sell or they’re marketing a new form of training or therapy. A common
tactic used by these people is to invoke the brain to shore up their claims. Popular themes include the idea that
technology or other aspects of modern life are changing the brain in a harmful way, or the opposite – that some
new form of training or therapy leads to real, permanent beneficial brain changes. Often these kinds of brain claims
are mere conjecture, sometimes even from the mouths of neuroscientists or psychologists speaking outside their
own area of specialism. Look for independent opinion from experts who don’t have a vested interest. And check
whether brain claims are backed by quality peer-reviewed evidence (see point 5). Most science journals require
authors to declare conflicts of interest so check for this at the end of relevant published papers.

3.Watch out for grandiose claims. No Lie MRI is a US company that offers brain scan-based lie detection services.
Its home page states, “The technology used by No Lie MRI represents the first and only direct measure of truth
verification and lie detection in human history!” Sound too good to be true? If it does, it probably is.

Words like “revolutionary,” “permanent,” “first ever,” “unlock,” “hidden,” “within seconds,” should all set
alarm bells ringing when uttered in relation to the brain. One check you can perform is to look at the career of the
person making the claims. If they say they’ve developed a revolutionary new brain technique that will for the first
time unlock your hidden potential within seconds, ask yourself why they haven’t applied it to themselves and
become a best-selling artist, Nobel winning scientist, or Olympic athlete.

4.Beware of seductive metaphors. We’d all like to have balance and calm in our lives but this abstract sense of
balance has nothing to do with the literal balance of activity across the two brain hemispheres (see also p. 196)
or other levels of neural function. This doesn’t stop some self-help gurus invoking concepts like “hemispheric
balance” so as to lend a scientific sheen to their lifestyle tips – as if the route to balanced work schedules is having
a balanced brain. Any time that someone attempts to link a metaphorical concept (e.g. deep thinking) with actual
brain activity (e.g. in deep brain areas), it’s highly likely they’re talking rubbish. Also, beware references to
completely made up brain areas. In February 2013, for instance, the Daily Mail reported on research by a German
neurologist who they said had discovered a tell-tale “dark patch” in the “central lobe” of the brains of killers and
rapists. The thing is, there is no such thing as a central lobe!

5.Learn to recognize quality research. Ignore spin and take first-hand testimonials with a pinch of salt. When it
comes to testing the efficacy of brain-based interventions, the gold standard is the randomized, double-blind,
placebo-controlled trial. This means the recipients of the intervention don’t know whether they’ve received the
target intervention or a placebo (a form of inert treatment such as a sugar pill), and the researchers also don’t know
who’s been allocated to which condition. This helps stop motivation, expectation, and bias from creeping into the
results. Related to this, it’s important for the control group to do something that appears like a real intervention,
even though it isn’t. Many trials fail to ensure this is the case. The most robust evidence to look for in relation to
brain claims is the meta-analysis, so try to search for these if you can. They weigh up all the evidence from existing
trials in a given area and help provide an accurate picture of whether a treatment really works or whether a stated
difference really exists.

6.Recognize the difference between causation and correlation (a point I’ll come back to in relation to mirror
neurons in Chapter 5). Many newspaper stories about brain findings actually refer to correlational studies that only
show a single snapshot in time. “People who do more of activity X have a larger brain area Y,” the story might say.
But if the study was correlational we don’t know that the activity caused the larger brain area. The causal
direction could run the other way (people with a larger Y like to do activity X), or some other factor might influence
both X and Y. Trustworthy scientific articles or news stories should draw attention to this limitation and any others.
Indeed, authors who only focus on the evidence that supports their initial hypotheses or beliefs are falling prey to
what’s known as “confirmation bias.” This is a very human tendency, but it’s one that scrupulous scientists and
journalists should deliberately work against in the pursuit of the truth.

Arming yourself with these six tips will help you tell the difference between a genuine neuroscientist and a
charlatan, and between a considered brain-based news story and hype. If you’re still unsure about a recent
development, you could always look to see if any of the following entertaining expert skeptical bloggers have
shared their views:

www.mindhacks.com - Vaughan Bell (Twitter)

https://www.discovermagazine.com/blog/neuroskeptic - NeuroSkeptic (Twitter)

https://neurocritic.blogspot.com/ - NeuroCritic (Twitter)

http://neurobollocks.wordpress.com – Abandoned since 2015, but still great content on it.

A Primer on Basic Brain Anatomy, Techniques, and Terminology

Hold a human brain in your hands and the first thing you notice is its impressive heaviness. Weighing about three
pounds, the brain feels dense. You also see immediately that there is a distinct groove – the longitudinal fissure –
running front to back and dividing the brain into two halves known as hemispheres. Deep within the brain, the two
hemispheres are joined by the corpus callosum, a thick bundle of connective fibers. The spongy, visible outer layer
of the hemispheres – the cerebral cortex (meaning literally rind or bark) – has a crinkled appearance: a swathe of
swirling hills and valleys, referred to anatomically as gyri and sulci, respectively. The cortex is divided into five
distinct lobes: the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe near the crown of the head, the two temporal lobes at each side
near the ears, and the occipital lobe at the rear. Each lobe is associated with particular domains of mental function.
For instance, the frontal lobe is known to be important for self-control and movement; the parietal lobe for
processing touch and controlling attention; and the occipital lobe is involved in early visual processing. The extent
to which mental functions are localized to specific brain regions has been a matter of debate throughout
neurological history and continues to this day.
Hanging off the back of the brain is the cauliflower-like cerebellum, which almost looks like another mini-brain (in
fact cerebellum means“little brain”). It too is made up of two distinct hemispheres, and remarkably it contains
around half of the neurons in the central nervous system despite constituting just 10 percent of the brain’s volume.
Traditionally the cerebellum was associated only with learning and motor control (i.e. control of the body’s
movements), but today it is known to be involved in many functions, including emotion, language, pain, and
memory. Holding the brain aloft to study its underside, you see the brain stem sprouting downwards, which would
normally be connected to the spinal cord. The brain stem also projects upwards into the interior of the brain to a
point approximately level with the eyes. Containing distinct regions such as the medulla and pons, the brain stem
is associated with basic life support functions, including control of breathing and heart rate. Reflexes like sneezing
and vomiting are also controlled here. Some commentators refer to the brain stem as “the lizard brain” but this is
a misnomer. Slice the brain into two to study the inner anatomy and you discover that there are a series of fluid-
filled hollows, known as ventricles, which act as a shock-absorption system. You can also see the midbrain that sits
atop the brainstem and plays a part in functions such as eye movements. Above and anterior to the midbrain is the
thalamus – a vital relay station that receives connections from, and connects to, many other brain areas.
Underneath the thalamus is the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, which are involved in the release of hormones
and the regulation of basic needs such as hunger and sexual desire.

Also buried deep in the brain and connected to the thalamus are the hornlike basal ganglia, which are involved in
learning, emotions, and the control of movement. Nearby we also find, one on each side of the brain, the
hippocampi (singular hippocampus) – the Greek name for “sea-horse” for that is what early anatomists believed it
resembled. Here too are the almond shaped amygdala, again one on each side. The hippocampus plays a vital role
in memory and the amygdala is important for memory and learning, especially when emotions are involved. The
collective name for the hippocampus, amygdala, and related parts of the cortex is the limbic system, which is an
important functional network for the emotions.

The brain’s awesome complexity is largely invisible to the naked eye. Within its spongy bulk are approximately 86
billion neurons forming a staggering 100 trillion plus connections. There are also a similar number of glial cells,
which recent research suggests are more than housekeepers, as used to be believed, but also involved in
information processing. However, we should be careful not to get too reverential about the brain’s construction –
it’s not a perfect design by any means (more about this on p. 135). In the cortex, neurons are arranged into layers,
each containing different types and density of neuron. The popular term for brains – “gray matter” – comes from
the anatomical name for tissue that is mostly made up of neuronal cell bodies. The cerebral cortex is entirely made
up of gray matter, although it looks more pinkish than gray, at least when fresh. This is in contrast to “white matter”
– found in abundance beneath the cortex – which is tissue made up mostly of fat-covered neuronal axons (axons
are a tendrillike part of the neuron that is important for communicating with other neurons). It is the fat-covered
axons that give rise to the whitish appearance of white matter. Neurons communicate with each other across small
gaps called synapses. This is where a chemical messenger (a “neurotransmitter”) is released at the end of the axon
of one neuron, and then absorbed into the dendrite (a branch-like structure) of a receiving neuron. Neurons release
neurotransmitters in this way when they are sufficiently excited by other neurons. Enough excitation causes an
“action potential,” which is when a spike of electrical activity passes the length of the neuron, eventually leading it
to release neurotransmitters. In turn these neurotransmitters can excite or inhibit receiving neurons. They can also
cause slower, longer-lasting changes, for example by altering gene function in the receiving neuron. Traditionally,
insight into the function of different neural areas was derived from research on brain damaged patients. Significant
advances were made in this way in the nineteenth century, such as the observation that, in most people, language
function is dominated by the left hemisphere. Some patients, such as the railway worker Phineas Gage, have had a
particularly influential effect on the field. The study of particular associations of impairment and brain damage also
remains an important line of brain research to this day. A major difference between modern and historic research
of this kind is that today we can use medical scanning to identify where the brain has been damaged. Before such
technology was available, researchers had to wait until a person had died to perform an autopsy.

Modern brain imaging methods are used not only to examine the structure of the brain, but also to watch how it
functions. It is in our understanding of brain function that the most exciting findings and controversies are emerging
in modern neuroscience. Today the method used most widely in research of this kind, involving patients and healthy
people, is called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The technique exploits the fact that blood is more
oxygenated in highly active parts of the brain. By comparing changes to the oxygenation of the blood throughout
the brain, fMRI can be used to visualize which brain areas are working harder than others. Furthermore, by carefully
monitoring such changes while participants perform controlled tasks in the brain scanner, fMRI can help build a
map of what parts of the brain are involved in different mental functions. Other forms of brain scanning include
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Single-Photon Computed Tomography, both of which involve
injecting the patient or research participant with a radioactive isotope. Yet another form of imaging called Diffusion
Tensor Imaging (DTI) is based on the passage of water molecules through neural tissue and is used to map the
brain’s connective pathways. DTI produces beautifully complex, colorful wiring diagrams.

The Human Connectome Project, launched in 2009, aims to map all 600 trillion wires in the human brain. An older
brain imaging technique, first used with humans in the 1920s, is electroencephalography (EEG), which involves
monitoring waves of electrical activity via electrodes placed on the scalp. The technique is still used widely in
hospitals and research labs today. The spatial resolution is poor compared with more modern methods such as
fMRI, but an advantage is that fluctuations in activity can be detected at the level of milliseconds (versus seconds
for fMRI). A more recently developed technique that shares the high temporal resolution of EEG is known as
magnetoencephalography (MEG), but it too suffers from a lack of spatial resolution. Brain imaging is not the only
way that contemporary researchers investigate the human brain. Another approach that’s increased hugely in
popularity in recent years is known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). It involves placing a magnetic coil
over a region of the head, which has the effect of temporarily disrupting neural activity in brain areas beneath that
spot. This method can be used to create what’s called a “virtual lesion” in the brain. This way, researchers can
temporarily knock out functioning in a specific brain area and then look to see what effect this has on mental
functioning. Whereas fMRI shows where brain activity correlates with mental function, TMS has the advantage of
being able to show whether activity in a particular area is necessary for that mental functioning to occur. The
techniques I’ve mentioned so far can all be used in humans and animals.

There is also a great deal of brain research that is only (or most often) conducted in animals. This research involves
techniques that are usually deemed too invasive for humans. For example, a significant amount of research with
monkeys and other nonhuman primates involves inserting electrodes into the brain and recording the activity
directly from specific neurons (called single-cell recording). Only rarely is this approach used with humans, for
example, during neurosurgery for severe epilepsy. The direct insertion of electrodes and cannulas into animal brains
can also be used to monitor and alter levels of brain chemicals at highly localized sites. Another ground-breaking
technique that’s currently used in animal research is known as optogenetics. Named 2010 “method of the year” by
the journal Nature Methods, optogenetics involves inserting light-sensitive genes into neurons. These individual
neurons can then be switched on and off by exposing them to different colors of light. New methods for
investigating the brain are being developed all the time, and innovations in the field will accelerate in the next few
years thanks to the launch of the US BRAIN Initiative and the EU Human Brain Project. As I was putting the
finishing touches to this book, the White House announced a proposal to double its investment in the BRAIN
Initiative “from about $100 million in FY [financial year] 2014 to approximately $200 million in FY 2015.”

Myth 18 – The Brain is a Computer

“We have in our head a remarkably powerful computer” (Daniel Kahneman)

An alien landing on earth today might well come to the conclusion that we consider ourselves to be robots. The
computer metaphors are everywhere, including in popular psychology books; also in the self-help literature: “your
mind is an operating system” says Dragoș Rouă, “Do you run the best version of it?”; and in novels too, like this
example in The Unsanctioned by Michael Lamke: “It had become a habit of his when deeply troubled to clear his mind
of everything in an effort to let his brain defragment the jumbled bits and pieces into a more organized format.”

The popularity of the mind-as-computer metaphor has to do with the way psychology developed through the last
century. Early on, the dominant “behaviorist” approach in psychology outlawed speculation about the inner
workings of the mind. Psychologists like John Watson in 1913 and Albert Weiss during the following decade argued
the nascent science of psychology should instead concern itself only with outwardly observable and measurable
behavior.

But then in the 1950s, the so-called Cognitive Revolution began, inspired in large part by innovations in computing
and artificial intelligence. Pioneers in the field rejected the constraints of behaviorism and turned their attention to
our inner mental processes, often invoking computer metaphors along the way. In his 1967 book, Cognitive
Psychology, which is credited by some with naming the field, Ulric Neisser wrote: “the task of trying to understand
human cognition is analogous to that of … trying to understand how a computer has been programmed.” Writing in
1980, the American personality psychologist Gordon Allport was unequivocal. “The advent of Artificial
Intelligence,” he said, “is the single most important development in the history of psychology.”

Where past generations likened the brain to a steam engine or a telephone exchange, psychologists today, and
often the general public too, frequently invoke computer-based terminology when describing mental processes. A
particularly popular metaphor is to talk of the mind as software that runs on the hardware of the brain. Skills are
said to be “hard-wired.” The senses are “inputs” and behaviors are the “outputs.” When someone modifies an
action or their speech on the fly, they are said to have performed the process “online.” Researchers interested
in the way we control our bodies talk about “feedback loops.” Eye-movement experts say the jerky saccadic eye
movements performed while we read are “ballistic,” in the sense that their trajectory is “pre-programmed” in
advance, like a rocket. Memory researchers use terms like “capacity,” “processing speed” and “resource limitations”
as if they were talking about a computer. There’s even a popular book to which I contributed, called Mind Hacks,
about using self-experimentation to understand your own brain.

Is the Brain Really a Computer?

The answer to that question depends on how literal we’re being, and what exactly we mean by a computer. Of
course, the brain is not literally made up of transistors, plastic wires, and mother boards. But ultimately both the
brain and the computer are processors of information. This is an old idea. Writing in the seventeenth century, the
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said “Reason … is nothing but reckoning, that is adding and subtracting.” As
Steven Pinker explains in his book The Blank Slate (2002), the computational theory of mind doesn’t claim that the
mind is a computer, “it says only that we can explain minds and human-made information processors using some
of the same principles.”

Although some scholars find it useful to liken the mind to a computer, critics of the computational approach
have argued that there’s a deal-breaker of a difference between humans and computers. We think, computers
don’t. In his famous Chinese Room analogy published in 1980, the philosopher John Searle asked us to imagine a
man in a sealed room receiving Chinese communications slipped through the door. The man knows no Chinese but
he has instructions on how to process the Chinese symbols and how to provide the appropriate responses to them,
which he does. The Chinese people outside the room will have the impression they are interacting with a Chinese
speaker, but in fact the man has no clue about the meaning of the communication he has just engaged in. Searle’s
point was that the man is like a computer – outwardly he and they give the appearance of understanding, but in
fact they know nothing and have no sense of the meaning of what they are doing.

Another critic of computational approaches to the mind is the philosopher and medic Ray Tallis, author of Why The
Mind is Not a Computer (2004). Echoing Searle, Tallis points out that although it’s claimed that computers, like
minds, are both essentially manipulators of symbols, these symbols only actually have meaning to a person who
understands them. We anthropomorphize computers, Tallis says, by describing them as “doing calculations” or
“detecting signals,” and then we apply that same kind of language inappropriately to the neurobiological processes
in the brain. “Computers are only prostheses; they no more do calculations than clocks tell the time,” Tallis wrote
in a 2008 paper. “Clocks help us to tell the time, but they don’t do it by themselves.”

These criticisms of the computer metaphor are all arguably rather philosophical in nature. Other commentators
have pointed out some important technical differences between computers and brains. On his popular Developing
Intelligence blog, Chris Chatham outlines 10 key differences, including the fact that brains are analog whereas
computers are binary. That is, whereas computer transistors are either on or off, the neurons of the brain can
vary their rate of firing and their likelihood of firing based on the inputs they receive from other neurons.

Chatham also highlights the fact that brains have bodies, computers don’t. This is particularly significant in light of
the new field of embodied cognition, which is revealing the ways our bodies affect our thoughts. For example,
washing our hands can alter our moral judgments; feeling warm can affect our take on a person’s character;
and the weight of a book can influence our judgment of its importance (see p. 164). The opportunity to make
hand gestures even helps children learn new math strategies. In each case, it’s tricky to imagine what the
equivalent of these phenomena would be in a computer.

Memory provides another useful example of how, even on a point of similarity, brains do things differently from
computers. Although we and they both store information and retrieve it, we humans do it in a different way from
computers. Our digital friends use what psychologist Gary Marcus calls a “postal-code” system – every piece of
stored information has its own unique address and can therefore be sought out with almost perfect reliability. By
contrast, we have no idea of the precise location of our memories. Our mental vaults work more according to
context and availability. Specific names and dates frequently elude us, but we often remember the gist – for
example, what a person looked like and did for a living, even if we can’t quite pin down his or her name.

Myth: The Computational Theory of the Mind Has Served No Benefit

So, there are important differences between computers and brains, and these differences help explain why artificial
intelligence researchers frequently run into difficulties when trying to simulate abilities in robots that we humans
find easy – such as recognizing faces or catching a Frisbee. But just because our brains are not the same as
computers doesn’t mean that the computer analogy and computational approaches to the mind aren’t useful.
Indeed, when a computer program fails to emulate a feat of human cognition, this suggests to us that the brain
must be using some other method that’s quite different from how the computer has been programmed.

Some of these insights are general – as we learned with memory, brains often take context into account a lot more
than computer programs do, and the brain approach is often highly flexible, able to cope with missing or poor
quality information. Increasingly, attempts to simulate human cognition try to factor in this adaptability using so-
called “neural networks” (inspired by the connections between neurons in the brain), which can “learn” based on
feedback regarding whether they got a previous challenge right or wrong.

In their article for The Psychologist magazine, “What computers have shown us about the mind” Padraic Monaghan
and his colleagues provided examples of insights that have come from attempting to simulate human cognition in
computer models. In the case of reading, for example, computer models that are based on the statistical properties
of a word being pronounced one way rather than another, are better able to simulate the reading of irregular words
than are computer models based on fixed rules of pronunciation. Deliberately impairing computer models running
these kinds of statistical strategies leads to dyslexia-like performance by the computer, which has led to novel clues
into that condition in humans.

Other insights from attempts to model human cognition with computers, include: a greater understanding of the
way we form abstract representations of faces, based on an averaging of a face from different angles and in
different conditions; how, with age, children change the details they pay attention to when categorizing objects;
and the way factual knowledge is stored in the brain in a distributed fashion throughout networks of neurons, thus
explaining the emerging pattern of deficits seen in patients with semantic dementia – a neurodegenerative disease
that leads to problems finding words and categorizing objects. Typically rare words are lost first (e.g. the names for
rare birds). This is followed by an inability to distinguish between types of a given category (e.g. all birds are
eventually labeled simply as bird rather than by their species), as if the patient’s concepts are becoming
progressively fuzzy.

There’s no question that attempts to model human cognition using computers have been hugely informative
for psychology and neuroscience. As Monaghan and his co-authors concluded: “computer models … have provided
enormous insight into the way the human mind processes information.” But there is clearly debate among scholars
about how useful the metaphor is and how far it stretches. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summed up the
situation well. “The brain’s a computer,” he said recently, “but it’s so different from any computer that you’re used to.
It’s not like your desktop or your laptop at all.”

Will We Ever Build a Computer Simulation of the Brain?

“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years” said the South African-born neuroscientist
Henry Markram during his TEDGlobal talk in 2009. Fast forward four years and Markram’s ambitious ten-year
Human Brain Project was the successful winner of over €1 billion in funding from the EU. The intention is to build a
computer model of the human brain from the bottom up, beginning at the microscopic level of ion channels in
individual neurons.

The project was borne out of Markram’s Blue Brain Project, based at the Brain and Mind Institute of the École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which in 2006 successfully modeled a part of the rat’s cortex made up of
around 10 000 neurons. The Human Brain Project aims to accumulate masses of data from around the world and
use the latest supercomputers to do the same thing, but for an entire human brain. One hoped-for practical
outcome is that this will allow endless simulations of brain disorders, in turn leading to new preventative and
treatment approaches. Entering the realms of sci-fi, Markram has also speculated that the final version of his
simulation could achieve consciousness.

Experts are divided as to the credibility of the aims of the Human Brain Project. Among the doubters is
neuroscientist Moshe Abeles at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He told Wired magazine: “Our ability to understand all
the details of even one brain is practically zero. Therefore, the claim that accumulating more and more data will lead to
understanding how the brain works is hopeless.” However, other experts are more hopeful, even if rather skeptical
about the ten-year time frame. Also quoted in Wired is British computer engineer Steve Furber. “There aren’t any
aspects of Henry’s vision I find problematic,” he said. “Except perhaps his ambition, which is at the same time both
terrifying and necessary.”