Brain, Vision, Memory
Tales in the History of Neuroscience
Charles G. Gross
In these stories, which describe the growth of knowledge about the brain
from the early Egyptians to the present time, Charles G. Gross attempts to
answer the question of how the discipline of neuroscience evolved into its
modern incarnation through the twists and turns of history.
The first essay tells the story of the visual cortex, from the first
written mention of the brain by the Egyptians, to the philosophical and
physiological studies by the Greeks, to the Dark Ages and the Renaissance,
and finally, to the modern work of Hubel and Wiesel. The second essay
focuses on Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical work on the brain and the eye:
was Leonardo drawing the body observed, the body remembered, the body read
about, or his own dissections? The third essay derives from the question of
whether there can be a solely theoretical biology or biologist; it
highlights the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish
mystic who was two hundred years ahead of his time. The fourth essay
entails a mystery: how did the largely ignored brain structure called the
"hippocampus minor" come to be, and why was it so important in the
controversies that surrounded Darwin's theories? The final essay describes
the discovery of the visual functions of the temporal and parietal lobes.
The author traces both developments to nineteenth-century observations of
the effect of temporal and parietal lesions in monkeys--observations that
were forgotten and subsequently rediscovered.
Charles G. Gross is Professor of Psychology, Program in Neuroscience,
Princeton University.
A Bradford Book
April 1998
7 x 9, 280 pp., 50 illus.
ISBN 0-262-07186-X
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