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History of neurosciences

What is Neuroscience?

Neurosciences emerged as an offshoot of biology and medical sciences, philosophically inspired by scientism

in the 19th  century, postulating the absence of any endogenous (proceeding from within) cause for human

behavior. With the evolution of scientific knowledge and methods, chemistry, psychology, computer science

and physics all largely contributed to any progress within the field.

Likewise, a modern branch of philosophy had a great impact on the way to look at Neurosciences, most

notably through what is called cognitive science (Cognitive Neuroscience).

One of the most famous examples of the confrontation between Philosophy and Neuroscience is the quest

for the location of the soul within the brain in the 17th  century, philosopher René Descartes   used

neuroscientific arguments to claim that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul (while also claiming it

existed as a distinct entity): where various brain elements have a kind of symmetry in each hemisphere, the

pineal gland doesn’t.

Today science has outgrown the specifics of this particular question, but the philosophical approach of

scientism still plays an important part in every paradigm set up in the field of neurosciences.

Aristotle tells us that the heart rules our body, not the brain

For millennia, common belief was that the seat of your mind was in the heart of the human body: in your

heart.Aristotle argued this belief against Hippocrates, for instance, who believed that thoughts, feelings and

emotionscame from the brain .

https://www.mental-waves-for-happiness.com/brain-definition/https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/aristotle-116.phphttps://www.famousscientists.org/rene-descartes/https://www.mental-waves-for-happiness.com/brain-definition/

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Today we know that Aristotle’s vision is wrong, but for many years it was dominant and widespread

(probably due to the tachycardia triggered by intense emotions, in contrast with the absolute absence of

sensitivity from thebrain) and can still be found in some common idioms:

●   “You are breaking my heart”,

●   “You have a heart of stone”,

●   “To know something by heart”… 

The seat of the “leading soul” is the brain

Following Galien’s experiments, it became impossible to doubt that the seat of the “leading soul” was the

brain. The centuries that followed did not see significant advances, in spite of a wealth of debates striving to

explain the specifics of the human mind and despite the rebirth of anatomical studies in the early 16th 

century.

Descartes thought that the soul could only be linked to a thinking substance (res cogitans ) radically different

from any matter qualified as extended substance (res extensa ).

Conversely, Julien de la Mettrie denied the necessity of relying on a bridge between mind and matter (the

pineal gland according to Descartes): he claimed that the body should be considered as a machine in which

the brain is the organ where what is called the soul can manifest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Offray_de_La_Mettriehttps://www.mental-waves-for-happiness.com/brain-definition/https://www.mental-waves-for-happiness.com/brain-definition/