DISCOVERIES IN THE HUMAN BRAIN. NEUROSCIENCE PREHISTORY, BRAIN STRUCTURE, AND FUNCTION.

Abstract

By Louise H. Marshall and Horace W. Magoun. 1998. Pp. 322. New Jersey: The Humana Press. Price $59.50. ISBN 0-89603-435-6. The overwhelming impact of this book is not just the discoveries it describes so well, but the portraits it paints of the discoverers. Without the tools and scientific techniques presently available, these scientists used their minds, patience, perseverance, and scientific method to deduce and discover facts of enduring importance. The discoverers and their discoveries emerge in sharp focus from these beautifully illustrated and comprehensively referenced pages. Each of the dozen chapters concludes with a brief overview of its essential messages, consolidating for the reader its relevance to previous chapters and its contribution to those which follow. The introduction embraces three broad postulates. The first, the continuum, is the relentless, continuing but ever-changing evolutionary process. This launches the reader directly into the early evolutionary gestation of the most important and versatile of organs, the human brain, recorded over time by its protector—the skull—as it responded to the many and changing physical and social pressures imposed by man's early environment. These, stimulating or necessitating invention for survival, led to the continuing adaptation of the early human brain as outlined by the skulls of Olduvai (Tanzania) and elsewhere. A medical student pilgrimage by one of us to Olduvai in the 1960s not many years after the Leakeys' discoveries, reinforced by the infectious enthusiasm of the lone guide and custodian who had worked with them, was an unforgettable experience reawakened by this introductory chapter. The second postulate recognizes the hierarchy of levels of nervous system structure and function, and, with Ivan Sechenov—named by Pavlov the `father of Russian physiology and scientific psychology'—came the birth of electrophysiology. For more than fourteen centuries the third postulate, dating from Galen, that function determines structure, spawned all aspects …