So after explaining the basics of the brain background, I'm just going to highlight

the different types of topics you'll take on this course. And again it's just a slide
that says that. So um we're going to start with this historical background today.
Next this coming Friday I'll talk about the neuroanatomy. What are the actual
structures you need to know about the brain. And it'll be the anatomy that we
think you need to know, not what most textbooks want you to know. Most
textbooks are written for medical students. We'll talk then in a couple of lectures
on research methods in neurotechnology before going into sensory systems how
we see the world, how we move in the world, how we construct the world in our
brain. And then we'll get into things like emotions, memories, social behaviour,
and then get into things like consciousness before delving into and prefrontal
function before delving into what goes wrong. So what happens in neurological
conditions and what happens in mental health? The mental health research on
this course will be about brain structure. What happens when we actually
undergo problems with that. So that's what you would be seeing if I was able to
get into here or aren't there? Um, after that, I'd just say that the main topic of
today is to understand the key developments in the history of our understanding
of brain and behaviour. So what has happened historically, you're going to learn
the key historical figures. If we can get in, if you can see, um, and what they
discovered. And for this course. If you look in the details, there's one written
exam. So we've asked one essay question. And then there's some multiple
choice questions. So some of you may have also read slide. Um if you manage to
get access to it slide 16 and use an example of this. You haven't set the course
yet. But an example MCQ, to think about as we go forward is which ancient
culture was first thought to have specified the word brain in a written text? So
was it the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, or the Persians who came up
with the word brain and wrote it down? So you'll find it here? Yes. Very good. Did
you know that before looking at the slides? Yeah, I guess so. That is in the British
Museum. That's very good. That's exactly what we're after. So that's the kind of
style of the Mcqs. They're not like huge. They're very short opening. Like, what
do we think this is for or something quite straightforward. But it does require
reading the material. And in some cases you can bring your background
knowledge. Okay. So hopefully the AV will start to kick in and we'll get someone
in here to help. So I'm going to move to the the last few slides that are about
that are preamble in um in terms of brain and behaviour. If we go back
historically. Uh, the first point, you can see anything in the kind of ancient history
that relates to this course is skulls. Skulls dug out of the ground that appear to
come from radiocarbon dating from 7000 years ago. So if you could see on the
screen you see a horrible looming skull, but a very strange skull. So something
you can see on the screen, other people's slides, this skull, like a lot of skulls
from pre-history, have, like, tax cuts or like, you know, horrible fractures in them
because they've been brutally murdered. What's odd about these skulls is only a
small number of them is they've had a hole or large, really large hole the size of,
I don't know, like a a couple of USB sticks here, that sort of size hole cut into
their heads. It's like specifically, you know, someone's work to cut a kind of
square hole in their head and you wouldn't do any kind of brutal way. And it kind
of like in a battle and then it's healed up. So somebody had these large holes cut
in their head, which is called trapping and cutting through the skull. And the
brain healed up and clearly lived for some time with a large hole in their head,
probably not for a super long time, because it's extremely easy to get infections.
There's a reason your brain want to keep a skull and all those layers on your
head as the infections can get in, but what we speculate, we don't know because
there's no written text. But these these people, we assume the anthropologists
and archaeologists guess that perhaps people thought they needed to let
demons out, or something needed to be done to help people, and that cutting
into somebody's head might be an important treatment. It doesn't work, funnily
enough. You know, we'll go on at the end of this course. Talk about neurosurgery
in the 1950s, which grew up, which right now you could bet you could walk it,
you could walk within five minutes. And I can bet that somebody's having a brain
surgery done in London right now and one of the hospitals here, um, but yeah,
that didn't work in 700 BC. So over 7000 years ago, I should say. So if we jump
forward from that, say, okay, that was the earliest, but we're not sure whether
they really were aware of the link between brain and behaviour. There's a hint
the first real evidence of a culture being interested in brain and behaviour was
indeed going back to the first in the audience to ancient Egyptians. So they have
things like the text of the book of the days the Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphics
and other scripts, but in the hieroglyphic translations that were made possible by
the Rosetta Stone, which I think is over there in that direction, it's orient myself
in space. So you could walk now and again. You could see the Rosetta Stone and
enable people to decipher that. They found the word brain in these ancient
Egyptian texts about which are particularly involved in mummification. So the
Egyptians, as you may know, if you go to the British Museum, were obsessed
with the afterlife and taking their kings, the Pharaohs, wrapping the mummified
them and putting them in tombs. And they were also back then, they were
priests and people in charge. And in fact, one of the remarkable things that take
away out of this lecture is back. We're talking 3000 BC in the writings there, the
Egyptian writing, it's clear that these original physicians who work for the Kings
were aware that if one of their pharaohs right side of the head got damaged, like
if it's a big, you know, some big axe or some spear damaged the right side of the
head, then they were going to lose the ability to move their left leg and arm or
their face would change. But basically that the right side of your head, your brain
controls the left side of your body, and that the left side of your brain controls
the right side of your body. Nobody, to this day, really knows why. There's still no
rational like, why would it do that? We don't have an answer. People will have
speculated, but it's one of those how so questions. It's not clear what the
massive advantage of having it do that is. But your brain does. Everyone in this
room, you can guarantee it. The ancient Egyptians knew that that information
was lost for thousands of years. It was not written down again until you got into
this sort of, you know, hypocrisies, as we'll get onto. So the ancient Egyptians
really were the first culture to dive into talk about brain and behaviour. But
before I go on, just say when they mummified their dead, they really put effort
into taking out their Pharaoh's heart, his guts, bits of his body. But they scooped
out the brain and threw it away. So while they had these treatments, they were
they just didn't think the brain was that important. So if you went back in time to
ancient Egypt, they just didn't think it was that big a thing you need in the
afterlife. Your heart. Oh, yeah. You need your heart. But your brain. It wasn't
obvious. So there's a sort of mixed, you know. Is there any culture? It's not one
idea. It's a number of ideas. So we haven't yet got the AV people in, but I'm
going to start working through a number of historical characters just by talking.
And for people who can maybe peer over and see there are some pictures. But
effectively, today's lecture is a sequence of people's faces, because I find it's a
useful way to learn about the history of neurosciences, to focus on individuals
nowadays. Of course, at UCL, as I said, there's a large really mega hub for people
researching brain and behaviour. Um, you couldn't do that. It's quite hard to pick
out. Oh, that person Bob, he's amazing. Why not Joe, who's also amazing if you
go back in time. Historically, very few people had the money, the funds and the
capacity really to do the research. So we really do focus on key individuals. The
first person we get to on that journey after ancient Egypt, a major change. And
what I'm giving today is partly a historical lecture on thinking is the first major
figure to arise and say, do you know what it looks like? The brain, this thing
inside our skull is the thing that gives rise to our thoughts, our ability to think
and to decide and to remember things is what gives us our cognition. And that
was Hippocrates in ancient Greece. And this is now, um, we're talking 460 BC
was when he was born. So he was a physician. He went around healing people.
He is the most he is the the father of the grandfather of medicine. The whole
idea, you can apply rigorous approaches to help your people. And so if, doctor, if
you take a you take a medical degree, you make the Hippocratic Oath after
Hippocrates to do no harm. Then no matter who your patient is, you shouldn't be
harming them. You should be healing them with something he mandated in
ancient Greece. And he had this real, um, he really is the key. The fact you need
to link together there is Hippocrates, ancient Greek physician first, to argue that
systematically, the brain was there for behaviour because he could see it in his
patients. He had enough patients who had brain damage to see it had
devastating effects. So that was a practice. And that was that would have been
great. We could have carried on historically from uh, 460 A.D. and built up all the
knowledge we have now, if it would work, if a people had would listen to him and
just taking that idea forward, but they didn't. Two men came forward to argue.
You know, maybe I'm talking maybe 100. You know, around around time within
the with at the end of his lifetime, the end of hypocrisies lifetime. Two major
figures arose that whose names will be surprised if you haven't heard of. And
they were Plato and Aristotle, the Plato and Aristotle. You'd have endless lectures
of what they said. If you take a it's like a sorry, you took a philosophy course here
at UCL. Still highly taught Aristotle and Plato. Huge, towering figures of
philosophy. But they really instituted that philosophical idea of arguing and
thinking and solving things by conjecture and not by experimental research. So
still to this day in the philosophy department, they will not want to do any
experiments. They won't test out ideas by what happens if I do this? It's what if
we do a thought experiment and Plato um, really argued that your reason and
perception, your reasoning, was in your head. So he thought Hippocrates was
right about that. But your whole feelings about the world, the way you feel, the
way you react to your passions, they're all down in your lungs and your heart,
you know. And so people still talk about that thinking with your stomach or
feeling with your heart or being heartbroken. So there is that link back to these
bits. But he didn't really go deeply into to what was going on. Aristotle even went
further and said, it's not the brain that drives all of our thinking, it's the heart.
And the reason that because he went into he went into a big lagoon and he'd
take apart and dissect all sorts of different animals you could find in the lagoon.
And always he found that if the heart stopped, there was nothing that the animal
would stop doing anything. But if he damaged bits of its brain or took that, they
would still wriggle and do things. As you will find out, you can damage a lot of
brain and an animal can still do quite a lot, and you could see the blood vessels
permeating all through the body everywhere and all these animals. So he
reasoned that if something was going to control and make an animal move and
do things, it had to be the heart that had to be the centre of what gave rise to
kind of thinking and the control of our bodies. And he was wrong, it turned out.
So, um, Plato and Aristotle had these big ideas. And of course, they then
dominated Western thinking for thousand years. You know, their writings got
retranslated by the Islamic period and picked up by the classical periods. And
they dominated a lot of thinking. And it really wasn't until, um, we get to, um,
you know, 150 A.D. so you jump forward in a 500 years of thinking until you get
a man living in ancient Rome called Galen. I mean, some wonderful
documentaries about Galen. He seems to have been a real a like an absolute
genius, but also very good at PR. And he became the right hand man to the to
the to the Caesar at the time. Um, but he was the key physician. And the key
thing about Galen is that he took a very systematic approach to understanding
the link between body and behaviour, all sorts of body aspects. And the reason
he could do that was that back in ancient Rome, of course, they had the huge
Colosseum that is still there functioning, and there was a lot of gladiatorial
combat. And Galen was in charge of helping to get these very expensive
gladiators back on their feet, but also, you know, wondering what had happened
when they got highly damaged. And he could clearly see Aristotle was wrong
clearly to Galen. And he used to say he was very good at PR. We wrote about his
work extensively and people copied it. And so we still have Galen's text and what
he wrote hundreds of years later. So Galen is really the first to really then re pick
up where Hippocrates had left off, provide detail and say more about what
different bits of the brain might be doing to rediscover that bit the Egyptians had
found about different hemispheres affecting, you know, so the gladiator had their
right hemisphere hacked out the left side so you could see there was the brain
was doing things. But exactly how what bits of it were doing things. Even the fact
that different bits might do things wasn't clear to Galen, but the clarity was
there. The heart is not what is governing your thoughts and thinking and
cognition and driving your behaviour. It's your brain. So that was Galen in ancient
Rome around 150 A.D. there was a big jump then, you know, again, we're getting
quite a lot of jumps. We'll start slowing down these jumps as we get into the
1800s. And a lot of things happen in science. But I think a nice part of the
journey goes from ancient Rome, then over to Iraq, down into Basra, and the
golden age of Islamic world appeared. And lots of scholars, a lot of the rest of the
world, um, didn't make major progress. But in in the Islamic world, there was a
lot of thinking. And the key scholar at that point, and this is now about 180. So
around just before the Battle of Hastings, over in Iraq, the people are whacking
each other's heads off not far from here. Um, a scholar called IB Alhassan or Al
Hansen, as he's also known in the Latin work. He he started to study lots of
things philosophy, physics, behaviour, physiology, medicine, just they were all
really there's a really active, engaged world. And the hands on the major
discovery he put forward was a that you can do science. He's one of the fathers
of the scientific method where he would look, test things and see what
happened. So he didn't formalise science as we know it now. But he argued that
that was a good way to think. Back then, 100 A.D. and up to 100 A.D., they
thought that when you look at the world, it's a bit like touching. So if I touch this
letter here in my hand, I can feel that and reach out and touch this thing.
Therefore, your eyes kind of did that with like they send things out, they
transmit. It's a bit like a dolphin. Dolphins echolocate. And they'll make clicks.
Things will go out and then you receive it back. So I can reach and touch. That's
how they thought vision worked. And our hands. That's rubbish. It's not accurate.
And the reason he got into that was that he was playing around with lots of light,
spheres of light in. He started to make different shaped objects that could pass
light through them. And he realised the human eye was exactly like this. You
have a pupil and you have an eyeball and it's a sphere and it can focus light. And
he then argued what must be happening, and he looked inside brains, and he
could see if you didn't just take out the eyeball. The eyeball went down a
pathway, and that went all the way into people at the back of people's heads. So
as a diagram, which you can't see, but if you're able to access the slides later,
you can watch the lecture cast back. You will see, um, that he had a diagram
back in 100 A.D. where people battle. Hastings is happening here, where he's
drawing the eyes information going into the back of the brain. And he's the first
person to ever argue that the back of a brain does sight, and he actually absorbs
light. And that's how you see, which is the view we have now 100, 100,000 years
later. So he did many other things in this amazing movies about him. But, um,
that was a really a really key bit. Again, let's jump another 500 years forward into
the Renaissance Italy. So we had the development of ideas, the Renaissance
Italy. Now, um, you know, of course, a lot of things Aristotle and Plato's thinking
was being resurgent, but people were able to aid the incredible and anatomical
dissection that they weren't able to do before they were able to draw. But most
crucially, in 1500s, we have the printing press. So you can now print things,
diagrams, create a book and then transmit it. And of course, the Bible was a
huge issue around the printing press. That was a huge transformation in the
world around that point. One of the things that happened in this time in the
1500s with um, in ancient Italy, it was woven in Renaissance Italy was a book
written called um dehumanised corporis Fabricius Fabrica, sorry, which is a text
on the fabric or the or the structure of the human body. And it was a beautiful
illustrated book dissecting all sorts of what does a body look like? And it became
a standard text for probably 100 years by a man called Andreas Vesalius, who
was quite a charismatic Italian and went around selling his book and again, like
Galen many years back, is very good at PR. He managed to make sure his book
became the anatomical textbook, but what was important is that he started to
diagram a diagram like draw the brain, a lot of detail, and now he's starting to
point out bits of it, unlike previous scholars, and say, what's this book called?
What's that bit? Let's start labelling bits of the brain. This Friday will go through a
lot of those labels and try and make it engaging and interesting, but ultimately it
is pointing at things and saying what they're called. He he also argued that the
the gaps in the middle of the brain, called the ventricles, are a big fluid bit. So
there's a lot of sort of milky fluid that sits inside your brain. That might be where
our kind of sensation, the movement, comes from, these kind of weird fluids,
because they're kind of getting interested in hydrogen, hydro hydraulics and how
could you move things with fluids? And maybe that he was completely wrong
doesn't appear to do that at all. The man who picked up on that, um, again, if
you were taking a philosophy course, this man would then dominate your
thinking for quite a bit. In the course was a man called René Descartes, who was
in France, and he was the first person to argue for kind of or to come up with bits
of algebra. The graphs we're going to use in our lectures, you'll have a y axis and
an x axis, and you'll see things correlated. René Descartes argued for that. He
also argued the famous centre. I think, therefore I am this argument that
because you think and you know you're away, you must exist. There's a
fundamental philosophical argument, but René Descartes also got really
interested in the dissociation and thinking and developed thinking around the
brain and behaviour in the sense there are some things you do that you can't
control. So if you accidentally put your hand on a hot plate or a fire, you will
reach out really quickly. If you don't, there's something really wrong with you.
Almost everyone will reach and pull the hand back. There are a few number of
individuals genetically unable to feel pain, which I won't talk about on this
course, but they found these people do not have pain receptors, and it's very
difficult for them to live a successful life because they'll end up with cuts, burns,
everything. But most people have this reflex, and he was able to see that in the
brain and the spinal cord. There are bits of the brain that are involved in reflex
and separately, the bits of the brain involved in things like deciding to get up in
the morning and go to a lecture on a psychology course. It's not a reflex. It's a
decision you've made. And so this dissociation between reflexes Axes and more
higher level control. He also argued that the this distinction between the body
and the soul, and so your capacity to think in your mind exists separately to your
body. And that's not a current perspective held up in, in neuroscience. But some
people will still hold that. But the main, predominant view in neuroscience would
be your thoughts, your reasons, your feelings, your sense of love. They are
arising from the activity in your in your neurones, the process of that and the fact
that we're conscious. Massive unknown questions about the quality of that. You
will get a lecture on consciousness. So René Descartes was really the lead for
that. So this is a lecture that does quite well without slides because these are
just people's faces I'm showing next. The next face you would see would be a
17th century man in a, in a one of these big giant wigs, Luigi Galvani. And you
wouldn't hear about him in the philosophy course, he wouldn't come up in that
course, but he would come up if he were doing the history of physics. Galvani
went right. He managed to find a way of putting giant copper sheets in, in spaces
with wool connected to them. He was interested in playing around with lots of
materials, ways of manipulating things, and what he did by putting these giant
bits of copper and wool together was he could create an enormous amount of
static electricity charge. You know, if you go into some squeaky floor, you can
charge that static electricity is all around us. But he was able to make a lot of it,
and we had a lot of electricity. You could start doing things with it. You could start
playing with things and making electricity. Shoot. One of the key things he
discovered was that if he got his electrodes out of this big mass of copper and
wool and a big setup, if he then put it onto a dead frog, you know, the French
would love to eat frogs. And he was he was in Italy, travelling around. So he
would take these frogs and he would stimulate the frog that was dead, and it
would reawaken and jump To his amazement, and the people. And he would tour
with this. So he would go around demonstrating that how electricity and the
point he made with his research doing this is that it seems that the brain is
involved in behaviour. We would establish this, but how? Electricity that your
fibres, those white fibres that come out of your brain that connects into your
hands, I'm using now and and wiggling my fingers. It's all electricity. They're
moving because there's a voltage change. And you'll hear next week about the
details of how those voltages change inside all of your cells. When you get more
into the details of what are the cells up to? One of the people that Galvani went
around and showed this to was a young 18 year old called Mary Shelley. She
observed him animating a frog and had a great idea. What if I turn that into a
novel and wrote the story of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster? Having seen
this frog jump back to life with the electricity. And we of course know now that
you can't reanimate people. But. And I think Mary Shelley probably realised this,
but it did make for a very good, successful book that still printed in vast
quantities. So that was Galvani and the discovery that you could reanimate
things. A rabbit, maybe 50 to 60 years later, we have Yohannes, Peter Mueller in
Germany. So we have Italians. We're going to move through a bit of Italy now and
moving into to Germany. Johannes Peter Muller was the first kind of person to
systematically say, look, we've got all these animals, we've got all this
knowledge, but let's try and organise it. Let's try and systematically think about
the fact there's different types of species out there, and how do they work and
how does the brain work. And he started to pull up and understand what
different bits of the brain might be doing, the fact that there are different bits of
blood circulation. So he was really Johannes Peter Müller, absolute founder of
kind of scientifically began that journey. So from Galvani was kind of, wow, look
what we can see. You can stimulate like things? Isn't this interesting? We can see
electricity. Mother was the first to say. Right, let's actually get this organised and
plan out and start to seek knowledge. He then influenced a lot of different people
from his workshop and his team in Germany, and he wrote a book on, like the
Fundamentalist Handbook of Physiology. It was like with the discovery that we
can study physiology, which is a lot of what this is. So that's Johannes Pieter
Muller when you get the slides. I've never seen a photograph of him smiling. He
looks like someone you would not want to work for, just by the looking, very
intense looking man. Um, around this time, we're in the late 1700s, early 1800.
Um, still in Germany. There's a scientist called Franz Francis Gold, and he thought
he liked this idea of modellers that you could systematically study things. And he
thought, I wonder, he must have met certain people with certain abilities. But he
started to think, I wonder if we could measure people's heads, some people with
giant heads or small heads or large, you know, front of their heads and see if we
can make predictions about their psychology. So he was asking the question of
people vary. Some people are really smart. Some people aren't smart. Some
people can read really quickly, some people can think better than others. Um,
and they start to measure people hundreds and hundreds of people's heads and
then make these relationships between bits of the skull and assume that
underneath those big bits of brain. And, um, he then drew something called
phrenology, this idea that the structure of your skull might relate to your brain
and it doesn't. There is absolutely no relationship at all. But it didn't stop him
touring Europe and telling everyone that we can, you know, we can measure.
Now, what it did instantiate was this idea that maybe there are things we can
measure that relate to your personality, and you will get lectures in this course
on that idea that there are bits of your brain that, if they're large, might allow
you to do things better. It's not quite that simple. But anyway, that's Franz
Francis goal. And he's in Germany, touring round. In France, there's a man who
Jean-Pierre Florenz, that hated this. Absolutely hate. And he did not like gall, as I
understand. So it was like these are bitter enemies. He then said, well, you can't
just go around measuring skulls. We need to go and test animals and try and
measure them and try and see what happens and take a causal approach instead
of just correlating. What if we go in and we cut out the front of the brain, what
will happen? Um, and what he then argues is did these incisions and changes, he
was the first to kind of do experimental science like that in France, and he found
no relationship to when he cut things out any. And the changes in behaviour,
they weren't particularly good at measuring behaviour and they weren't very
good at cutting things out. So it was a bit of a mess. He was later proved wrong.
It proved what we'll go through. The course is that different bits of your brain do
do. Different. Things. Like in fact our hands in a noticed in Iraq in the year 1000.
The back of your head seems to get all the stuff coming from your eyes, and
that's important. But back then in um, 18 early 1800s France, he had a dominant
perspective that, no, it's just a mush. The brain just does stuff. And as I said, we
didn't know there were brain cells at that point. So there's just a big fibrous mush
doing everything you need to do with no, no focus. That was the perspective held
by many people until a man called Paul Broca came along. And Paul Broca is
famous for a bit of the brain called Broca's area. So some scientists do so
successfully. The entire bit of the brain named after them. Paul Broca, was a he
did many different things, but he was a bit like a physician. He'd go around and
cure people, and he'd look at patients, and he would have a patient has a
gunshot wounds, or they had cancer or whatever it might be that affected a
number of cases coming through his his large access to different patients was
that. I certainly said that a number of them just lost the ability to speak a
perfectly healthy otherwise, but they could no longer talk and give any verbal or
their speech was really limited. And something we know now is Brock is aphasia.
So aphasia is a lack of being able to speak. And so Brock took the brains and
noticed, because he was careful of taking brains out and putting them into. And
if you get the slide, it's a very disgusting looking brain from back in 1800 that all
these patients had the damage to a certain bit of their brain, which he said this
bit. And then people said, well, call that Broca's area. So still in lectures today,
probably somewhere in the world, maybe in the United States, somebody is
giving a lecture or about to get up and give a lecture on what Broca's area is
doing in 2024. But that changed things because previously people argue that it
was to do with your skull. And then in Florence I said, no, it's all just the same.
Broca really made a big difference with that discovery, and he was joined over in
Germany by Karl Cavanagh, another scientist with his name on a bit of brains.
There's a bit of the brain called Wernicke's area and vernacular. It wasn't to do
with speech, it was to do with hearing. This is one scientist discovered if you
damage one bit, you can't speak, and another scientist discovering a more
posterior part of the brain. And if you damage that you couldn't understand,
speech is still here. So they could still hear noises. And you know a big train is
coming. They get out of the way, but they couldn't understand speech and they
had a similar focus. So these two scientists, these two physicians started to
make clear that language appeared to be focussed on separable regions in the
brain. And it appeared and for most of you in the audience, that over 90% of you,
your ability to speak will depend on your left hemisphere. The left side. I'm right
handed. All of you. Her right hand is very likely. If you're. If you're. If you're
Emmanuel or your left handed, it might be the other side, but not certainly. But
these are discoveries going back to the 1800s. And then we have the last few
cases. If I wrap up in the last three minutes to say there's a case called Phineas
Gauge, we'll come back to you in the course. Who had a sleeper, a large hole
used for creating railway tracks blown through the front of his head so fast it
didn't kill him. And it held. They discovered from that at the front of your brain,
the prefrontal cortex, essential for your personality. So he couldn't he couldn't
interact with people after that. There was another scientist who came along
called John Jackson, who discovered more about epilepsy and how different bits
of our brain work, who got three scientists called Ferrier friction hits, interested in
stimulating brains through careful stimulation. Um, and so they uncovered how
bits of the brain. Um. If you stimulate certain bits of the brain, people will move
and you stimulate other bits of the brain, they'll feel like they're being slapped or
tickled or whatever it is. So we had these three men who came along and did
that. Then we have I'm going fast to get through to the end of the lecture. Two
men, Golgi and Cajal, the man who drawer that drew the drawings at the
beginning, had this argument over whether the existence of individual cells and
so and so how through looking down the microscope could see there were
individual cells, um, and discover those. And the last few people to get through
were that we have discoveries in the general way in which our physiology works.
Through Hermann von Helmholtz, we have the discovery of the synapse. A
connection between the brain cells by Michael Charles shot a Sherrington in
Cambridge. So he wrote the next big book textbook on on physiology. And right
at the end of this journey, we jump to Canada. We jump to neurosurgeons in
Canada with Wilder Penfield going back to that early work from friction hits Lake
and Ferry and saying, what if we could locally anaesthetise someone's head,
keep them awake while we do brain surgery? You can imagine the challenge of
getting that agreed by the hospital bed. He did, and he was able to stimulate
people and work out where their epilepsy was coming from, and also map what
different bits of their brain did. And the last person on our list today is a woman,
and that is a lady who is now 106 years old, and her name is Brenda milner. And
we'll come back to her in our lecture on amnesia, because she was the first
person to really discover when a memory goes wrong, where it comes from by
studying surgical cases. So with that, I'll wrap up and you'll be able to get those
slides and you're going to get a lecture recording. We have where they are up
there. And I will see you back on Friday for the neuroanatomy and hopefully it'll
work next time. Thank you. Hey. For. Those who doubted. Cha cha. Cha cha.
Good. You said. Yeah, but I travelled. All. Right. Yeah. Yeah. With him, I think. Oh.
Thank God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh! You. Know? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I think so. Um.
Um. That's a shame. But massaging. Yeah. Oh, man. Very good. Um. Well, we
could put it on a stick and plug it in, I think. Oh, that's a good idea. You got a
memory stick? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Excellent. Memory style? Yeah, I have. Oh, I
do have. We can plug into the laptop as well otherwise. Oh, well. That's nice.
Nice, isn't it? Me neither. Is is. Here's the USB. Oh, yeah. So, Karen, get your
computer. Come on. You don't need it logged in already, so you just need to put
the USB in, I think. Just try it, see if it works. Um. Oh. Well done. Okay. Okay.
Okay. Um. Thank you. Okay, which one is the choice for the files? Okay. Yes. Is it
on here? So the slides aren't on there yet? I need to get it from Karen. Okay. This
works. It will work if you have. But do you have that button? No. Do you not have
it? I have, I got loads. Oh, you got loads. Oh my gosh. She got got loads of chairs
over there. I can sit over there. I wanted to use the microphone. Oh. No. Oh. Oh.
What's happened there? What's it done? It was doing something. It was doing
something to preserve the water that you put it in for week nine. That's my
photo. It's fine. No no, no. Let me just take it out and. Then. I find it. I can find it.
Yeah, but it's jacked. So do you want to do the first floor and second floor? I
don't. Know. I don't care. Um, you know, I am very relaxed. Is that a excellent
comment? It's working. Well, there's. Never doubt. I think they really enjoy it.
Yeah. For sure. I know, I have to do it in person. I know, thank you. So, um. This is
work. By the way, you may have to have your days. This is work. Week 901,
week six. Is that on the screen? Let's do this. Yeah. Okay. Thank. You. Let me
start. Karen, you know how to do PC. pieces. How do I see all of the folders in
there? Right. Should we just take. Oh, there is, there is. Also there goes. Oh, I
thought it was already in the blank screen. Yeah. Oh well did that what is it that.
Oh that's the PDA. What's wrong with that? That should be fine. Because it's not
going to be interactive. Oh, yeah. That's great. Okay. I was thinking that maybe I
shouldn't do the other way around next time because there's more space out
there. So maybe ask students to come in through there. And people tend to like.
Oh, okay. Cause otherwise there's lots of people at. The other one. And then
crossing it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think it would cost if you were in the services area
and people made their. Is that full screen the other way out? Yeah. We see. Yeah.
We can maybe ask them to. Next time you wait on that side. No, that is the
name. Okay. Well we are. Yeah. Let me let me go and see. How many chairs you
are. All about. We're here. You got. Another? Question? Yeah. Okay. Is this one
still need charging now? I think that was fully charged. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's
start by what will be the main topic of reflection for the next few weeks. It is the
human brain. It's an incredibly complex subject. As you're probably aware,
there's tens of billions of neurones and there are very intricate connections
between the different nuclei, the different clusters of neurones. We're obviously
still in the process of figuring out exactly how, you know, we will look at this
course, what have we figured out so far? And you know, what are different ways
of approaching the brain when we're thinking about behaviour, right? What's
interesting is that pretty much everything, right? Like behaviour, cognition,
emotion, language, culture, you know, every thought you might have, every
dream. If you write like a ice poem or paint a painting or equation. Throughout
human history, everything that we have been doing, we have been doing thanks
to the brain. Right. It wouldn't have been possible without the brain. And yet, for
thousands of years, people weren't really aware of what this object was doing,
right? So people didn't even think it was the centre of cognition. It's only in
recent years that our knowledge last written relatively historically speaking, and
that our knowledge of the brain is kind of growing and that the focus on the brain
is kind of growing. So today your name, as you know, the first lecture is just
looking at the history of our understanding of the brain, how different people
have studied the subject, how different people have approached thinking about
the brain. And. Well, yeah, suffice to say, it's not actually as pristine as it looks in
the picture, right? If you saw a brain out of in someone's call, it will look much
more like this one. You have that many different move and the painful move and
I feel you cannot tell much of what's going on with behaviour or with cognition
just by looking at the picture of the brain, right? Even if you take it and you slice
it up, you know, you see different sections, different regions and you can kind of
tell that they look slightly different, but still you cannot see much. However, if
you take something like silver nitrate, right, you can make dark things appear,
you can dye the different structures of the brain. And once you look at the
microscope, an entire world of neurones opens up something like this, right? You
see the body of the neurone, and then this very strange branches. This almost
like the roots of a tree, the dendrites. And here's just a picture of a single brain
cell. Here are several cells and they can take many different forms. When you
once you die, the brain and look at them through the microscope. These
obviously are some old drawings of the brain and it's obviously not just individual
cells, but whole networks of them. Right. Here's another example of yourself. And
here is a similar technique applied to a cut in the spinal cord. Right. This will be a
study not only the brain, but also other parts of the central nervous system of
this nervous system. And here you could cut through a bark, a rat, a human. You
look very similar to this. You can see the different cells inside and, you know, just
somewhat more pictures of looking creatures that we have inside our heads,
some arm and yet more. And you can tell the kind of boundary like a structure
and all the other ones floating around. Now, we won't be showing you this
beautiful drawings throughout the throughout the course. And if you've opened
the handbook, you will have noticed that it looks nothing like this. Um, but I, you
know, I always want I always like to go back to this type of thing so far, early
neuroscience, because I think they compared some of the mistakes, some of the
excitement that one has when starting to study the brain. But I here's one more
right of some nerve fibres twisting around the cell. And all of the pictures have
shown. You come from Santiago Ramon Cajal, who receives the Nobel Prize
laureate for this kind of work. You know, not just because they are beautiful
drawings, but because he used this technique of dying and the microscope to
argue for the existence of neurones, right? For the existence of nerve units that
are anatomically and genetically independent and for arguing that this was really
what was going on in the brain and in the nervous system. He has a very nice
quote. I think that captures a lot of the fascination that he had with the brain.
And I think some you know, that comes through in the in the drawings. But this is
what he says about studying the brain like an entomologist chasing butterflies in
colourful hues. My attention was drawn in this garden of grey matter to cells in
delicately elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul. Right. The
mysterious butterflies of the soul that he became obsessed with. And, you know,
somehow out of these strange creatures, it could be like some sci fi drawing of
some alien. Somehow, out of the connection between the neurones, the mind
emerges. Right? And, you know, this is really the the kind of core concern of
neuroscience and your students here at UCL and this is one of the leading
centres in the world for calling this topic right for neuroscience. So we are the
first in Europe, We are the second world I think, right now. And that means that
well, first of all, there's a lot of money coming in to the different interesting
experiments, but also a lot of brilliant people working on different aspects of the
connection of brain and behaviour. So brain and connection. And a number of
Nobel Prizes have been made here. So it's really a privileged place to work in
neuroscience and to study neuroscience. And you will be, you know, you'll
probably be able to tell when you see the different speakers that we have
throughout the course. Now again, you will notice that the course is not just
called brain. It wouldn't be very poetical, but it's called brain and behaviour
because it's not just looking at cognition, it's also looking at the brain with
behaviour in mind, right? It's not just about the structure of the brain for its own
sake. It's not just medicine like during Artemis and module. Really the focus here
is on behaviour. How does the brain work so that we can do what we do? How
does the brain give rise to behaviour and will you know, we'll always look at
aspects of cognition. Also we'll look at the motion, we'll look at dreaming, but
they will also be oriented towards action, oriented towards getting a grasp of the
world which we think is really essential for survival, essentially an evolutionary
family also. And because of the complexity of the issue, right, because of the
complexity of the brain that I just discussed briefly, but also because of the
complexity of being human and the wide range of things that humans do. It's a
very interdisciplinary area, right? So you get some people coming from
psychology, some people coming from chemistry, some computer scientists,
which, you know, really exciting media. And here, you know, when we look at
neuroanatomy, when we look at some of the more trickier, more factual parts
that you will need to study and study thoroughly, always think about behaviour,
right? Always keep in mind that when we're looking at different regions of the
brain, we're looking at different chemicals. It's always looking at what function,
that's what we can do and how does that function then contribute to behaviour,
right? So just to give you a flavour, that's roughly how the course is divided,
which you'll be able to tell as you go through the Moodle and the first couple of
weeks we'll look at the foundations of behavioural neuroscience. Today, we'll look
at some historical perspectives and then three lectures on neural anatomy. Then
we'll look at research methods for another week. How do we, you know, what are
different methods that we can use to study the brain? Things like ephemera or
or. And ethics. And then we'll move to week by week different topics in random
behaviour. Right. Again, with different experts coming to talk about their topic of
expertise. So we'll start with first order systems, right? Things like sensory
systems. How do we perceive. How do we sense the world, the motor systems
have to react in the world. And, you know, going to be more abstract to
decisions, emotions, stress. So, you know, going towards more complex functions
and then towards the end to, you know, things like learning consciousness
motivated behaviour. Now there are two main ways of interacting with the
lectures. The first one obviously asking questions here, but the main ones I think
is going into the Moodle. You can do two things. You can go into the forum, right?
If you go to the Keeping Tabs tab, then there is a forum where you can ask
general questions about the module. So questions that you have about
neuroscience, questions that you might have about the module in terms of, you
know, exam questions or, you know, what's the weight of the multiple choice
questions? Was the weight of the essay type questions? And then there's lecture
specific questions that you can ask also on the model. So you could, you know,
every week there will be a hot question tab opening for that week's lectures. And
you can ask questions there and you can also vote on each other questions,
right? If you are like, oh, you know, you go there to ask a question, you realise
that someone has asked the question you wanted to ask anyway, you can kind of
look it up. So it goes up in priority and for the, for the lecture. And I think it's very
good to, to ask questions in the forum because you will have a hard time in the
forum on what questions have because you will have hard time to process the
material. You'll have had time to really formulate your question well. And also it
gives a space for the lecturer to think about the question. Write it down quite
precisely, and also maybe sometimes link to all the interesting material, right? If
you ask me a question here, I can like produce a hyperlink, but I can put it on the
forum. So that's some of the advantages. Of course, you can always just raise
your hand if you have a clarification question. If I say something and I'm on the
wrong slide or you, I completely lost you. It's good to raise your hand and ask so,
so far for what the module is as a whole. And again, I'll be the convenor, but I
won't be teaching all of the lectures, I'll be teaching a few of them and you'll
have a few other lecturers in and out. And for today really we're going to look at
the history of neuroscience even further because obviously we will look at the
one before it was called neuroscience, World War people doing when they were
thinking about the brain. And every lecture will have some learning objectives.
The learning objectives for today is just acquire a knowledge of key
developments in our historical understanding of brain and behaviour and learn
who the key historical figures are in brain research and what they discover. So
hopefully you'll get a sense of who the key figures are, what the main discoveries
were, and also what the methodological developments were. Right? How
different people through the ages I studied the brain and how this influences how
we study it right now. And you know, this is an example of some question. So this
how has an understanding of the brain changed since ancient times? And this
will be obviously more of and I a question you will also have multiple choice
questions. Right. So we might ask you what changes in culture is first thought to
have specified specific word brain in written text? Is it the Greeks have
Apollonius, Egyptians, the persons? It is the Egyptians. Right? And it's a lot of
material in this course but will really help you along the way to to to get a good
grasp on the material and get a good sense of what we might ask you in the
exam and how everything connects together. Right. So let's start with a further
adieu with the history part. I don't know if you have heard of this term, but this
picture illustrates something called Trapani. You see here there is a skull on. The
skull has a hole which you know, not very well. A lot of people sometimes died
because of brain injury. So it might be you know, it could have been a spear or an
arrow. But in this case, it's actually something quite different here. The skull was
cut and then they won't heal. So this person got a cut into into their skull and
then the you know, it heal. It's believed that it was for medical treatment.
Obviously, we don't know for sure. I guess it was 10,000 years ago. But
archaeologists and anthropologists when. They think that there might be some
religious purpose, but most likely in a lot of these it will be part of some, you
know, medical intervention. So maybe something like that. Let's see. So it tells
you that obviously people were aware that the brain was there for a very long
time. People were aware that it played some important function even if they
didn't quite understand why. And, you know, after this, we are in the dark
historically for quite a while. And then you have the Egyptians tell you this,
probably familiar to all of you because you are kind of a few hundred metres
away from the Rosetta Stone. But, you know, we didn't really know what this with
any of the hieroglyphs meant. Then the Rosetta Stone was discovered. We
started being able to translate some of these. And one of the interesting findings
is that the Egyptians had a word for brain, right? So they you know, they wrote
about the brain and they wrote about treatments for brain damage. And very
interestingly, they observed that damage to one hemisphere of the brain affects
movement and sensation on the contralateral side of the body. Right. So they
figure out that if you have a trauma here, you'll have trouble moving your arm
here or something, Right. And this person, again, they figured this out. Unclear
what the whole underside of the brain was because we only had with some
pieces. But, you know, just for context, they they took the brain out for burial.
Right. So maybe they didn't think it was so important or so central after all. So
when we're going to look at today's historical celebrities of the brain so, you
know, people we can name that we we know the works. They produce. We know
the historical context with quite a bit more detail than in the case of the Egyptian
understanding of the brain. And we'll start in Nancy in Greece Will, as you can
see, there's a lot of white bearded man here. And then we went on, a brilliant
female scientist passing through. Some are quite a critical person, scientists in
the development of neuroscience, optics, astronomy and a lot of other things.
Let's start by the properties. You'll probably be familiar with him because of the
Hippocratic Oath in medicine that, you know, they always go personnel to always
have come to patients. And he's really, you know, the founding figure of
medicine of modern medicine as it is today. He wrote more than 70 books on
medicine and he really systematise existing knowledge. And it's all based on
observation. Right? So a very big change at the time. And interesting for Case,
he argued that the brain supports the mind and behaviour, right? He gave the
brain a very central role both for thinking and production. And then, you know,
there's gist of philosophers and we, you know, we went backwards a bit with
their contribution. So there is place on our total who you're probably familiar with
if you've taken a lot, of course, or anything else. AP And Plato, of course, this is
part of his broader theory of what the human being is like. I can argue that
there's this big difference between reason and the passions, and he argued that
reason and perception lay in the head. But the passions are in the heart and
lungs, liver and guts. So things like emotions, things like intuition. He thought it
was all visceral, right? Still, you know, when you think about someone being
brainy, you'll smell think of some how cold thinking versus like the hot thinking of
the, you know, of of having a gut feeling this kind of things. It's still it's still
pervades our kind of nice understanding of brain and the kind of distinction right
between passions in the heart and reason in the brain. And even further, you
know, it's Aristotle, right? Aristotle argued specifically against Hippocrates, and
he says that actually sensations and control are not in the head at all. They're
governed by the heart. And what the brain is, is a kind of cooling mechanism,
right? It's just first rule of law, which obviously sounds kind of ridiculous right
now only are like philosophers. Right. But he you know, if you went and dissected
animals like he's also very influential in biology. And the reason he saw this was
twofold. Right? The first one is that he figured out that you could cut parts of the
brain. The animal is still alive. Actually, the moment you have the spine, you get
some response and you get some motor stuff. But if you cut out the heart or if
you do any damage to the heart, the creature dies. Right? So so obviously the
mind, everything. The soul of the heart. And he also he wasn't able to to really
understand how neurones or anything like that. And I can figure out that from the
brain you got like the spinal cord, but from the heart you got arteries and veins
that went everywhere, right? So this was his his reason for thinking that it was so
central. Now we move a few hundred years forward and we go from ancient
Greece and Rome. We get Galen, right. He was a physician in Rome. But, you
know, Rome was a lot of places back then. So he was actually born in Pergamon,
which nowadays is Turkey, right? So he said in a way, a Turkish Turk is a scholar
and also a Roman scholar in a way. And he specifically argued against Aristotle.
Right? This was the first major development against his total. He also did a lot of
other things. He was the first physician to use the false as a sign for illness. And
he did a lot of work in advancing the state of of medicine. But he you know, he
was working with gladiators. He was a kind of physician for for gladiators. So he
saw a lot of brain damage. Right. Kind of first hand. And he was able to notice
that there was a kind of correlation between brain damage in particular areas
and different cognitive behavioural dysfunctions. Right. So he you know, he used
to argue that the brain was responsible for sensation and for behaviour, and
because he was able to see corpses also, again, because of, you know, gladiators
and the whole thing being quite brutal. And he figured out that the brain was the
site of termination of all five senses, right? That visual smell, auditory, they all
converge on the brain. And then we go forward almost a thousand years. We go
to Hanson, who was I mean, I put the YouTube video because it's just mind
blowing how incredible this guy was. Right? He he was mainly working on on
astronomy. Right. But then he started wondering how it is that we observe the
world and how we see that we are able to, like, see the stars. And the theory at
the time was that the eyes work a bit like a scanner, right? Almost like invisible
tentacles like you, something to it. And he, you know, he very quickly figured out
that's not how it works, Right? It is true. Like light is reflected. It enters through
the eyes and then it gets processed. He even figure out that it gets processed on
the back of the brain in the visual cortex. Right. And, you know, for all of his
studies, you know, he also did a lot of technological advancement. So he
basically invented the first camera like structure. Right? He invented what's
called the camera obscura, which is a pinhole device. So basically, you get a big
box that's dark inside and you put a pin sized hole inside. And what you get is a
reflection, an inverted reflection of whatever you are pointing the camera
obscura to. Right. This actually, if you put it on YouTube, you can make your own
camera obscura at home like the kind of activity for children. Like he's the first
one to figure out this kind of understanding of optics and then apply it to
neuroscience. Right now we go again 500 years forward and a bit further north to
Andrea's use. And this is in Renaissance Italy. He was an anatomist. He's he was
also very lucky because when he was around, there was print. So his work got
publicised a lot. It work. It got very widely distributed. So it became very
influential. And in particular this one work, Domenico put fabric right on the
fabric of the human body, which became a kind of handbook for everyone, right?
It's like they go to anatomy guys at the time. It also has very intricate drawings
because everybody was friends back then. He got Titian. I don't know if you go to
the National Gallery, you can see quite a few options. He got Titian's workshop
to, to send some apprentice to, to do the illustrations. Right. So it's a wonderful
illustration for this book. And you know, apart from condensing a lot of
knowledge, he he had a very particular view that was very influential, which was,
you know, I focus on the ventricles, right? He thought the ventricles were crucial
for sensation and movement. Now the ventricles, what they do, there's some
kind of conduct within the brain out of which the cerebrospinal fluid goes. Right.
And I think part of the reason that he thought these were so central is that the
word of the day back then was hydraulics, Right. A bit like everybody is now
buzzing about. Yeah, but then everybody was buzzing about hydraulics, so. You
get a lot of hydraulics metaphors in medicine, in neuroscience, right. So he
thought there was like some kind of fluid under this fluid was central to, you
know, brain cognition and behaviour. This view about this biblical view of the
brain. It's also, brethren, later in another couple, again, very influential
philosopher. And he also helped, you know, what you call a spirit and a kind of
account of a spirit of reflexes, perception, cognition. He also did a lot of math
and, you know, most most famous for philosophy. He had what's called a
method. They called out a kind of radical approach to doubting everything that,
you know, until there is something that you are not able to doubt. And so the
only thing that I'm not able to doubt is my own mind, right? Because I need my
mind to think. So at the moment I am thinking I must exist, right? This is a
cognitive orgasm. And then he thought that that's a weird thing about the mind,
right? The mind or the what's called the ego is somehow undoubtably. And from
there, he took like a very big stretch to saying that the mind was separate from
the body. Right. Separate, not physically, but separate in a logical sense. He
thought there were two logically independent entities, so that in principle the
mind could exist without the body and the body without the mind. And it just
they just happened to interact in the real world. Of course, the big question is
like, how do you get this kind of aethereal substance of the mind to interact with
this hard substance, the body to produce cognition and behaviour. And that was
called the mind body problem in philosophy that, you know, by extension in
psychology. And what he thought is that it all came down to the pineal gland,
right? He figured out that all of the muscles go to the brain, all of the perception
goes to the brain. And somewhere at the centre there is this gland. So that must
be the connection between the soul and the body. As it turns out, it's, you know,
it's not the seat of the soul. It's a gland that produces melatonin. So, you know,
it's important, but probably not as important as the cargo. And he also had some
amazing work on workplaces to figure out that there might be some automatic
way in which somebody reacts to danger, to threat and to pain and somewhere
in which the brain or the mind overrides it. And then we go into things, I start to
look a bit more familiar, right 100 years later with Google Panic. He was primarily
a physicist, right? But his, you know, at the time in which people started to
understand how electricity work and what he did was he took a huge room. He
filled it with copper plates and he put cotton in between the copper plates. And
then he took a wire running out of that room and connected to a frog's right at
that frog. And he was able to buy traditional electricity in this very complicated
manner, attached to attach the wire to the frog, to the to the spinal cord and get,
you know, reanimate the frog in a way, get the frogs legs to move. Yes, I said
gold went swimming. Right. So, again, this was the first insight into the
connection between electricity and neural activity. And, you know, if people were
really like obsessed with this at the time and this led to a whole movement called
Galvanism and his nephew actually took it very far. So the nephew of Galvani
started getting like the corpses from executed prisoners and just shocking them
with electricity to see them twitch. And you know, this a lot of people were
thinking that the key to immortality was here, Right? Like soon enough, doctors
and physicists working together, we're going to be able to electrify people back
into being alive. And there is this quote from Marcel that you might not say,
author of Frankenstein. Right? It gives you an idea of how influential these
experiments were. So this is Mary Shelley reflecting on a discussion that she had
with Byron, and particularly about Galvanism. Perhaps a corpse could be
reanimated. Galvanism had given token of such things. Perhaps the component
parts of the creature might be manufactured, brought together and endued with
vital warmth. Right? So she became kind of fascinated with Galvanism, then took
it to sci fi and wrote Frankenstein, which is this huge, influential gothic novel.
Right? And a bit later in German, we have Johann Campbell, who who wrote the
Handbook of Physiology that mentioned the Handbook of Human Physiology, and
one of his main contributions is distinguishing between motor and sensory
nerves, Right? He was able to stimulate different parts of the spinal. Corp in life
animals. And he figured out that if you stimulate the posterior roots of nerves
from a limb as they enter the spinal cord, you get insensible limbs. But they are
not paralysed, right? The animal is able to move them, but they don't feel pain.
And if you do the same on the anterior road, so the other side, you get the
opposite, right? The animals cannot move the limb, but they can sense it, right?
So he make this distinction between motor and sensory and errors based on
these type of experiments. And then again, very influential. It became like some
kind of like, you know, a friend. Is France Francis Gallop looking distinctly creepy
in this picture? He he was many things I thought of these people who say
biologist, anthropologist, philosopher and physician. He fought very hard for
taking metaphysics out of the study of the mind. But he's most famous for his
ideas about the organisation of the brain, right? He saw that there were specific
functions that are localised in different regions of the brain, and this is a difficult
map of the brain that were produced at this time. And not only did he find that if
you think that there was a functional organisation within the brain, he also
thought that people with larger areas were better at that function and that you
could tell from the outside, right? That somehow I feel in people's skulls, which is
what he's doing there, you are able to tell whether a person is very good of
consciousness, right? If like they have like a protrusion here, maybe they're like
very conscious or something. Again, a lot of these ideas are crazy. The reason he
figured this out is by studying, first of all, humans in comparison to other
animals, he figured out that humans have a much bigger central frontal cortex,
and he thought, Well, that must be where a lot of the typical human behaviours
and cognitive capacities like abstract planning and math come from. And he
figured out that there was, even within humans, huge variety of cognitive
abilities and huge variety of skull shapes, right? He was like, Well, if you can tell
roughly the brain of a monkey from the brain of a human just by looking at the
skull, maybe the same is true for humans, right? I think that's how this is
nonsense, right? He just took a lot of measurements. But he you know, I
incorrectly correlated to sets of variables. I still you know, phrenology is very
popular in know a popular type of thing. Like you can see here, a Homer Simpson
phrenology version with like sleep and doughnuts. Right. Which doesn't sound
much more ridiculous than the one to the left, but it tells you that it's you know,
it was very influential at the time and a lot of love has kind of transferred onto
this. And then there is this big opponent of Gal, right? Is Florence Course, a
French physiologist. And, you know, he is really the founder of experimental
brain science. He did a lot of experiments, found no evidence of the phrenology
view of functional specialisation. So he thought, you know, this is just nonsense.
And he did this, you know, quite, quite innovative. By the time animal studies in
which he did ablation studies, right, he took different parts of the brain of
animals. And he figured out that if you take the cerebral hemispheres, you
destroy the animal's capacity for perception will judgement. If you take out the
cerebellum, you take out the capacity for equilibrium and for coordinated motor
movement. If you take out the medulla oblongata, the animal dies, right? So then
the emphasis he made was, you know, the cerebral hemispheres are responsible
for the senses and higher cognitive abilities. The cerebellum regulates
component movement and the medulla oblongata is responsible for vital
functions. So there is some you know, obviously different areas are taking care of
different things, but not to the level of a specification that goal thought. Right. So
I think to start to advance, we have this big debate. Right. And a huge
development in the debate was actually the word of mouth, which a French
anatomist most famous for discovering Broca's area in the frontal lobe. Right.
You can tell say, well, that's visibly damaged there. And he was looking at
patients who had had lesions. He observed them behaviourally and did some
cognitive tests. And then he looked at their brain after they died. Right. And he
he was able to to establish this connection between lessons in Broca's area and
what's called broadcast aphasia. Right. A type of expressive aphasia. So an
impediment to producing language people who have this. Have particular
problems with normal grammatical structure as using a small words like
conjunctions, like such. And so it's a very big impediment to speech. And, you
know, he noticed that this was only on the on the left hemisphere. So he started
with a kind of dominance of the left hemisphere for language. And, you know,
right around the same time, he discovered another area a bit further back in the
brain, but same hemisphere which is responsible for language comprehension,
right? So you have this one area for language production, the other for language
comprehension. The two of them are actually connected by a neuronal tract.
And, you know, this these advances together really led the way in the
development of neuropsychology, right, of relating psychological functioning to
neuroanatomy, which is obviously natural psychology of students. What's really
interesting for you and and again, you get some evidence of cortical
specialisation, right? Like language production, language comprehension, but
you get a much more holistic understanding of how it works. It's really not in the
way that gold proposed, right, where like, caution is somewhere in the brain and
self consciousness is somewhere else. And it's also not predictable at all by skull
morphology, right? There's nothing you can predict from skull morphology at this
level. Here you get the case of Phineas Gates, who was a railroad worker who
was doing some work with explosives, and he'll step in. This closes with a pole
ignited the pole, went through his head like through his eye and out like fell
some 25m away and really damaged his frontal cortex. But he didn't die right,
holding an Oculus for a few years, but his personality was completely altered. He
was like unable to make careful decisions, unable to plan. He became impulsive,
aggressive, and he became a kind of celebrity case, right? He's like the only
celebrity that's not doing that in neuroscience. And you can now find actually
that both the skull on the pole in the Harvard Medical School, they have it in their
anatomy museum. So all of these cases, together with a broken neck and the
Gates case, which was quite famous, really had a big impact on neuroscience.
And then we move closer to home actually with John Huggins Jackson, who was
one of the key figures in the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurology and
Neurosurgery here in Queen Square. And he's mostly known for his work on
epilepsy. But, yes, you know, insights also in other forms of brain damage. And
he traced epileptic convulsions to lesions of the motor region of the cerebral
cortex. Right. So a big advance in what's called clinical localisation. And he
noticed something really odd with epileptic seizures is that the seizure starts in
the hand and then goes up the body all the way to the to the face. Right. And he
thought that it has to do something with activation in the brain. So he thought
that there must be a region of the brain that has activation that goes like hands
and body. Then, you know, different areas of the face, what's called a Jacksonian
marsh. So he hypothesised this just based on some observations on the
behaviour of patients and they were these people for a patient hits it actually
treatment and his second kind of replicated the experiments who were able to
support this hypothesis right to test it empirically so what they did was awfully
brutal really and they they open up a door and by now you could use batteries
full house for electrical stimulation. So they have they had a live dog, they
perform surgery and they were able to put electric currents in the motor regions
of the cortex and in the sensory regions of the cortex. And they will see that, you
know, moving a leg when stimulated in one area and moving their face in
another area. And they were able to build a kind of atlas of different neural
regions. Of course, this, you know, this is awful properties. I tell you, these kind
of experiments really led the way to shortly after the foundation of the U.S.
society to basically protect animals in psychology and medicine experiments.
And now the ethics for using animals in experiments are very tightly controlled,
thankfully. And you really need a very good justification to to be able to use
animals in your experiment. And then we go back to the pictures I showed you in
the beginning. Um, we have comedian Golgi and Monica have an Italian on the
phone. So Golgi developed the method, right, for staining cells with with a weak
solution of silver nitrate, which is particularly valuable in tracing the most
delicate modifications of the cells. He used it quite widely. I think, you know,
major developments in biology and Romania have really focussed on the brain,
right? And the neural structure. And he advanced what's called the neural
hypothesis, right? The hypothesis that really the brain is composed of neurones
that are somewhat autonomous and know that they are interconnected and they
receive the Nobel Prize together. And then Golgi spent the whole of his speech
ranting against the neurone hypothesis with Monica was not very happy about.
Then we have Hermann von Helmholtz, who again, there's some key
developments in vision condition science and also in how we should approach
psychology and neuroscience. And you know, I was going to say century, but the
previous century, we have three key figures that we're going to look at. The first
is Charles Koch, again, another Nobel Prize winner who has some very influential
work on reflexes and general principles of the nervous system. He also coined
the word synapse for the spacing between two neurones to successive neurones.
And here's will the Canadian surgeon who studied with Sherrington. So actually,
I've been to Washington and he went to Montreal and he founded the
Neurological Institute there, which is still operating today, very famous, called
the Neuro, and it was an interdisciplinary centre, the first of its kind where you
go surgeons, psychologists, different, you know, a very varied team looking at
the brain and looking in alchemical cases and then doing some research also.
And he developed what's called the Montreal procedure, which is used on
epileptic patients, right? So the idea is that you basically when a patient has
epilepsy, epilepsy, you need to take sometimes like a part of the brain that's
responsible for the epilepsy. If you take it out, the patient is the population right
now, they choose if you take the wrong part of the brain, that could have
devastating consequences. So you have to identify the part of the brain that's
causing the problem. And you also have to identify what are the functions that
are part of the brain is playing a role, right? If it happens to be the Broca's area,
then you don't want to take it out because that would mean the person can no
longer produce language. Right. So he he did. He developed this procedure and
because of the use of this procedure, he also was able to map a lot of the brain
functions of different areas. And then one of the people working on the centre
and he still lives today at 105 years old and still doing research. Very impressive.
Is Brenda milner right? She was a psychologist by training and then went to work
at the in Europe. And she has a very, you know, different approach to to the
people working there. And she actually did a very careful and methodical long
term studies of the patients there. Right. So she studied the patients and did a
lot a battery of tests before they came into surgery. And then for a long time, she
did tests on them after the surgery. Right. So people who had parts of their brain
removed, the most famous of which is based on exam few things, Henry
Molaison. He had very severe epilepsy and they removed that area. You can see
that, right? Basically the hippocampus. So again, he was cure for PFC, but he was
left severely amnesic, amnesic. He could not remember a single thing after the
operation. Right. Brendan Mueller worked with him for 30 years. The guy never
learned her name. Right. Every time she had to introduce themselves. So again,
she made this connection between the role of the hippocampus in memory. But
she also did something much more interesting, I think, even or recall interacting
with her face. Right. She figured out that, well, this patient was unable to
remember how an encounter, a task before he was progressing at the task. So if
he had a motor task, he will say, Oh yeah, I've never done this before, but with
time he will become better and better. So she was able to make the connection
that there were two independent memory systems of this, right? One of which
was motor memory, and the other one was the kind of memory you need to
remember people's names. Okay. So this hopefully has given you an overview of
key figures, right? So some folks here on there on the brain, but also, you know,
a sense of different approaches to a brain. You see an electrical. The Malaysian
International Studies on Ablation and use some microscopic approaches. Next
week, we're going to continue by looking at neuroanatomy. I'll make sure to exit
through this way so that the people today. Thank you so much. And she's like.
Just. And they might. I mean. Under these. Yeah. Yeah. No problem. I'll see you
later. It's. I actually think. Trying to be right. All right. 45. I love. So this. Is. Got it.
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want to do? Because I was so close. So rough. Yeah. I don't know. I don't. I don't
know what to say. I can't even. We're right. I don't know. No. I'm here to tell you.
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have information I should. Yes. I'm just here today to make sure you're on
Thursday. The 10th has changed since I last used it. I can wait around. What?
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the top there. All the way around this. So if you just click, was it a VGA audit? No.
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modes. Sometimes I have not been turning on. So you're up. It's up to you. If you
can. I think it's. Great. No. Not that. Right? Scott said the black car. We've got to
come out. That's it. That one. Okay, so. So if we go back into laptop, maybe that
will wake it up. Oh.