Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries

Cognitive science is now all the rage; contradictory, up-to-date hypotheses on how the mind works or doesn't work crowd bookstore shelves. It wasn't always thus. Finger (Origins of Neuroscience) complements the current vogue for brain books with a wide-ranging and detailed set of profiles reaching back to the distant past. Each chapter describes a figure or pair of figures whose ideas and treatments of the brain ""dramatically changed the scientific or medical landscape."" Finger points first to the Egyptian grand vizier Imhotep (c. 2600 B.C.), probable author of the ancient field medicine manual now called the ""Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus""; he moves swiftly to Hippocrates, who proposed the brain as the seat of consciousness. Finger's last chapter covers the neurobiologists Roger Sperry and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who both studied nerve growth in the 1940s and '50s; Sperry later studied patients who had lost their corpus callosum, the bridge connecting the brain's two hemispheres. Changing religious beliefs, animal dissections, advancing research technologies and pure chance, Finger demonstrates, have all played roles in the advance of our knowledge about minds and brains. Although the level of explanation and detail positions this study uncomfortably between academic and popular science writing; it will, however, please readers already interested in the history of science and curious about what generations of scientists past believed, guessed or found out about the brain. (Feb.)