Neuroscience 2008: History lessons
I always enjoy, as a bit of a departure from the rest of the conference, checking out the History of Neuroscience posters, typically situated in row ZZ through ZZZ of the enormous hall, and not so well-attended as the rest of the selection. Which is a shame, as many provide a really nice way to step back from calcium channel agonists or dopamine activity in area LMAN of the zebra finch brain, and take a wider-angle look at the field. Sunday's highlights: Aristotle; and a neuroscience of neuroscience.
A recent book by science writer Jonah Lehrer proclaimed in its title that Proust was a Neuroscientist. In it, Lehrer makes the point that Proust anticipated, in the early twentieth century, a lot of what neuroscientists have only recently found out about the strength of memories relating to taste and smell, and how memory depends on the time and situation of the individual.
Well, a poster today claimed that Aristotle too was a neuroscientist before his time. Aristotle talked about the psyche as a central faculty that connected up many other mental properties. A group from Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada, argue 'that psyche can be defined as neural activity', and 'our current views on consciousness, perception, sensation, and thought as neural processes may have been anticipated by Aristotle' – before anyone even had any idea what a neuron was.
Another history section favourite of mine was a poster entitled 'Circling the square: towards a neuroscience of neuroscience'. The presenter, Rutgers University's Kai Schreiber, who according to his website studies the neuroscience of vision, was not on hand to explain the (surely) tongue-in-cheek experiments, which included putting a subject (yes, just n=1) in a scanner and showing them neuroscientific articles. This apparently activiated 'their left brain'. Nice and specific. The poster's conclusion section claimed, among other things, that this neuro-neuroscience approach could lead to the creation of neural networks that could build neural networks, and that we surely aren't too far from a neuro-neuro-neuroscience, which I guess is a neuroscience of the neuroscience of neuroscience. Kai, if you're reading this, please feel free to explain. My suspicion is that it was really an anthropological observation gauging people's reactions to the neuro-neuroscience theory...
