Abstract
The experimental and conceptual contributions of Santiago Ramón y Cajal remain almost as fresh and valuable as when his original proposals were published more than a century ago—a rare example, contrasting with other related sciences. His basic concepts on the neuron as the main building block of the central nervous system, the dynamic polarization principle as a way to understand how neurons deal with ongoing active processes, and brain local structural arrangements as a result of the functional specialization of selected neural circuits are concepts still surviving in present research papers dealing with brain function during the performance of cognitive and/or behavioral activities. What is more, the central dogma of the Neuroscience of today, i.e., brain plasticity as the morpho-functional substrate of memory and learning processes, was already proposed and documented with notable insights by Ramón y Cajal. From this background, I will try to discuss in this chapter which new functional and structural concepts have been introduced in contemporary Neuroscience and how we will be able to construct a set of basic principles underlying brain functions for the twenty-first century.
Highlights
The experimental and conceptual contributions of Santiago Ramón y Cajal remain almost as fresh and valuable as when his original proposals were published more than a century ago—a rare example, contrasting with other related sciences
His basic concepts on the neuron as the main building block of the central nervous system, the dynamic polarization principle as a way to understand how neurons deal with ongoing active processes, and brain local structural arrangements as a result of the functional specialization of selected neural circuits are concepts still surviving in present research papers dealing with brain function during the performance of cognitive and/or behavioral activities
I will try to discuss in this chapter which new functional and structural concepts have been introduced in contemporary Neuroscience and how we will be able to construct a set of basic principles underlying brain functions for the twenty-first century
Summary
Received: 19 April 2015 Accepted: 16 September 2015 Published: 30 September 2015. The experimental and conceptual contributions of Santiago Ramón y Cajal remain almost as fresh and valuable as when his original proposals were published more than a century ago—a rare example, contrasting with other related sciences. Ramón y Cajal developed his dynamic polarization principle from his detailed reconstructions of the (organized) cellular structure of the cerebellar cortex (Figure 1), but he successfully applied the same principle to many other neural circuits, such as, for example, to the interaction of sensory signals with motor commands in the cerebral cortex He predicted that the centrifugal movement of voluntary motor commands transmitted across the two motor neurons (i.e., the projecting pyramidal cell and the motoneuron) to the skeletal muscles is originated in the dendrites of the pyramidal cells—that is, in the outer cortical layers, a cortical area receiving afferent sensitive, callosal, and other association fibers. More comments on this point are offered
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