CHAPTER 3

Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield

Franz Josef Gall: Brain Anatomist and Phrenologist

Pierre Flourens and the Discrediting of Phrenology

Localization Theory Revived: The Brain’s Language Areas

Memory and the Equipotentiality Debate

Stimulation of the Conscious Human Brain

Recent Developments: Cognitive Neuroscience and Social Neuroscience

Today, we take it for granted that the bodily organ most responsible for our intelligence and higher mental abilities is the brain. An intelligent person is said to “have brains” or “be a brain,” while the opposite case is a “lamebrain.” The assumption seems so obvious that it may surprise you to learn that it has been universally accepted by scientists only for the past 200 years or so. Before that, scholars disagreed widely about the nature of the brain and its importance for the functions of the mind or soul.

Aristotle, the greatest biological thinker of ancient Greece (see Chapter 1), downplayed the importance of the brain because of some accurate but misleading observations. Although richly supplied with blood in life, the brain’s vessels rapidly drain after death. The physical brain struck Aristotle as unimpressive in appearance, nearly uniform in its bloodless, grayish color and spongelike consistency. Moreover, he knew of soldiers whose brain surfaces had been exposed by battle wounds and who had reported no sensation whatsoever when their brains were touched. Aristotle found it hard to believe that what appeared to be a bloodless, insensitive, and generally uninspiring mass could be the seat of the highest human faculties. He assigned that role to the heart, seeing the brain as a relatively minor organ serving as a “condenser” of the vapors emanating from overheated humors that presumably rose to the top of the body. The cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricles, which Descartes called animal spirits, was for Aristotle the product of the brain’s condensations.

While the brain did have some supporters, Aristotle’s dismissive assessment of it continued to be echoed in various forms by other influential investigators for 2,000 years. In ancient Chinese culture, the spirit and soul were said to reside in the heart. Accordingly, when early texts were translated by Chinese scholars, mental philosophy was translated as the study of the heart and spirit.* We saw in Chapter 2 how in the seventeenth century Descartes localized some important functions in the brain but did not believe a perfect and unified entity like the rational soul could be housed in a divided structure like the brain. And while the pineal gland—his nominee for the most likely point of interaction between body and mind—was physically in the brain, it constituted but a very small part of the total structure. One hundred years after Descartes’s death, the brain would become the center of considerable attention as researchers attempted to understand its role in mental life. Many were especially intrigued by the question of whether it operated as a unified whole or as a coordinated set of separate parts, each with a specific purpose.