The Lashley Award

The Karl Spencer Lashley Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Neurosciences has been bestowed upon 50 of the world's leading neuroscientists of the last half century but is not well known. It originated in 1953 when Lashley accumulated excess stock holdings and established a Fund for Neurobiology with 52,000 dollars to provide small grants for neurobiological research. Several years later the assets were transferred to the American Philosophical Society to administer and convert to an award for achievement in neurobiology The nature, amount, and format of the award have evolved ever since. These changes in the award and the characteristics of its recipients are described.     

The New Maternal State: The Gendered Politics of Governing through Behaviour Change

Abstract: Policies explicitly aimed at changing people's behaviour and recasting state–citizen relations are becoming prevalent in the UK. New political rationalities of “co‐production”, “personalisation” and ‘soft” or “libertarian paternalism” seek to cultivate a relationship between the adaptive state and the active citizen which is increasingly pedagogical. Informing these new pedagogies of governing is research from behavioural economics, psychology and the neurosciences, from which policy strategists draw insights aimed at improving the effectiveness of behaviour‐changing interventions across a range of policy spheres. This paper develops perspectives from feminist economics, critical psychology and feminist political theory in order to demonstrate how such research offers a gendered account of human behaviour and thus is used to assert a conversely gender‐blind explanation of the legitimate role of the state in governing through behaviour change.     

世界硬币评奖及其他

硬币作为“货币”,乃是“最一般的商品等价物”;硬币作为“收藏品”,则是一件富有历史文化意义和艺术欣赏价值的“商品”。正像所有的工艺品或艺术品一样,硬币有它自己的设计→生产→发行等一系列过程。设计中有“评选”,发行中有“评论”,最后还有“评奖”。本文主要以纪念性收藏币(纪念币)为例,谈些点滴所见所知。(一)先说设计。正如商品要有工业设计一样,硬币设计是最基本和关键的一环。广义的设计或策划应包括:主题的选定(立项),币材和币形的选用,制作工艺的安排,发行量的确定和正背面币图设计。这些因素综合决定了纪念币的收藏价值和未…     

One Hundred Members of the Association of British Neurologists: A Collective Biography for 1933–1960

This article draws a quantitative portrait of British neurology in the interwar and postwar periods through an analysis of the first 100 members of the Association of British Neurologists. Through its presentation of data, this article argues that the members of the Association of British Neurologists were extremely ambitious and as a whole had attained unusually high levels of social, professional, and civil distinction. It makes this argument through an examination of their social and educational backgrounds, the trajectory of their careers, and their achievements in the form of editorships of journals, professorships in medicine, positions in government, honorary degrees, and other indicators of merit. This collective study therefore offers an explanation for how the Association of British Neurologists transformed from an elite club in the 1930s into an organization that eventually came to represent clinical neurology across Britain.     

The Myth of Reserpine-Induced Depression: Role in the Historical Development of the Monoamine Hypothesis

For five decades it has been generally accepted that reserpine, an antihypertensive and antipsychotic drug, causes depression. The discovery that reserpine depletes brain monoamines was an important factor in the development of the monoamine hypothesis of depression, and it continues to be widely cited in support of this hypothesis. The present paper argues that, contrary to prevailing belief, reserpine is not depressogenic. The reason for perpetuation of this myth is reluctance to discard the monoamine hypothesis. This hypothesis ushered the modern biochemical paradigm into psychiatry and is still of great importance. It serves as a heuristic to guide research, it enhances psychiatry’s prestige, and it helps to validate and promote drug therapy for depression and other mental disorders.     

DIALOGUES IN HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography and Historians of Neuroscience: Towards Diversity in the ISHN

This article introduces and critiques the historiographical tradition of the history of the neurosciences as it has been established in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN). The founding members of the ISHN were practitioner-historians, practitioners of the neurosciences with an interest in the great moments, ideas and controversies in the history of their field. The historiographical precedent set by these clinician-historians emphasized those aspects of history most interesting to them. Academic historians bring a different approach to the history of the neurosciences, particularly an interest in studying the intellectual and cultural contexts of both the inherited and the forgotten ideas about the nervous system. Their approach to history has not been well represented in the ISHN, in part because the current historiographical tradition does not address their interests. This article highlights the methodological and epistemological differences between academic and practitioner-historians and discusses the difficulties that other historical societies have faced in trying to bring them together. The article then suggests ideas for symposia that might facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue and a revised historiographical tradition that speaks to the needs of both academic historians and practitioner historians.     

Conceptual Mediation: Philosophy between the History of Physiology and Contemporary Neuroscience

Summary

In the 1780s the anatomist Vincenzo Malacarne discussed the possibility of testing experimentally whether experience can induce significant changes in the brain. Malacarne imagined taking two littermate animals and giving intensive training to one while the other received none, then dissecting their brains to see whether the trained animal had more folds in the cerebellum than the untrained one. This experimental design somewhat anticipated one used 180 years later by Mark R. Rosenzweig at the University of California, Berkeley. This paper explores some methodological aspects of the case study just outlined by pointing out that our grounds for being interested in it are neither merely neuroscientific (for, strictly speaking, Malacarne's proposal was false) nor narrowly historical (for there is no causal chain linking Malacarne's ideas to Rosenzweig's experiment). Rather, the really interesting point here is to what extent Malacarne's ideas are similar to Rosenzweig's, a point that we can better investigate by employing certain conceptual tools borrowed typically (but not exclusively) from (a certain kind of) philosophy. If we do not handle the analogy with care, we run the risk of ‘discovering’ nothing but void platitudes or anachronistically misleading common features.     

Creativity in 3D: Poets and Scientists Converge on Writerly Invention

Abstract

Data from interviews with accomplished poets is used alongside findings from neuroscience, to examine three aspects of writerly invention: automaticity, emotional knowledge, and the social dimension. Writerly invention references the creative process writers use to originate ideas via writing. It is shown that a three-dimensional view of writerly invention becomes tenable when scientific findings are viewed in a consilient manner with the introspections of poets. In addition, a call is made for the sciences to help elucidate a mind-state found to be germane to writerly invention — the receptive stance.     

商代赏赐金交研究

商代末期铭文字数渐次增加,记事性金文也逐渐流行起来。商代青铜铭文中最常见的内容有族氏铭文、族氏铭文加祖先称谓、单纯的铭“某作某器”等。另外还出现了记事性铭文。这类记事性铭文．字数多在10字以上。这些记事铭文,以赏赐为其内容核心,附带的一些相关记事性内容则多是说明赏赐的因果。我们称商代晚期的这些以赏赐为核心内容的青铜器铭文为赏赐金文。下文从赏赐动词、赏赐物、赏赐地点、赐者与受赐者、赏赐缘由几个方面对这类铭文稍作分析。     

Exploring Poetry with Cognitive Neuroscience: T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Research that involves both neuroscience and art often attempts to explain the aesthetic experience of ‘beauty’ in visual art, and to define the function of art in neural terms; less has been written concerning the neural correlates of poetry reading. It is suggested that there are existing areas of study in neuroscience that may help elucidate how we enjoy literature beyond pure neuroaesthetics, such as research in creative problem-solving, knowledge-based pleasure, and music. This essay endeavours to bring together insights from both neuroscience and literature to shed light on how and why we take pleasure in interpreting T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It is proposed that the pleasures of reading ‘Prufrock’ are ultimately associated with the ways in which the reader's expectations are confirmed or challenged. While the conclusions of this paper are intentionally constrained to a single poem, they are potentially generalisable.     

Classic Studies on the Potential of Stem Cell Neuroregeneration

The 1990s and 2000s were the beginning of an exciting time period for developmental neuroscience and neural stem cell research. By better understanding brain plasticity and the birth of new neurons in the adult brain, contrary to established dogma, hope for therapy from devastating neurological diseases was generated. The potential for stem cells to provide functional recovery in humans remains to be further tested and to further move into the clinical trial realm. The future certainly has great promise on stem cells to assist in alleviation of difficult-to-treat neurologic disorders. This article reviews classic studies of the 1990s and 2000s that paved the way for the advances of today, which can in turn lead to tomorrow’s therapies.     

WHERE NEUROSCIENCE GETS THINGS WRONG (AND RIGHT)

Alex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong holds that our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long evolutionary pedigree and a genetic basis, but this vehicle involves a defective theory of human nature because it involves a defective theory of the brain as shown by neuroscience. Reviewing his arguments, I argue that our attachment (if any) to history as a vehicle of understanding is not an inherited characteristic as evolutionary theory, if relevant, would require, but is developed culturally. I also argue that an evolutionary basis for a cognitive capacity does not undermine its reliability as a vehicle of knowledge or understanding. Moreover, evolutionary theory and neuroscience are separable theories, and neuroscience is misused and misunderstood by Rosenberg. Rosenberg holds that neuroscience provides a better theory of mind than does the “theory of mind” used by historians (as he understands them), where the latter is assumed by him to involve explaining by reference to beliefs and desires. However, Rosenberg illegitimately adopts what philosophers of mind call “theory‐theory” to characterize historians' assumptions and does not recognize that neuroscience need not be conceived as a rival theory of explanation of action. He wrongly supposes that historical narratives are essentially explanations of individual action. A better use of neuroscience is to learn that “imagining the past” and “imagining the future” use the same brain processes, and just as imagining the future has no causal chain linking the relevant brain states directly to reality, so we have no reason to think that “imagining the past” does. Getting our imaginings correct requires sound historiographical expertise.     

THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM REDDY,BARBARA ROSENWEIN,AND PETER STEARNS

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian's intellectual‐biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy's concepts of “emotive,”“emotional regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein's “emotional community” and on Stearns's “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian's ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women's history” in the 1970s.     

Domus Willisi: A Neuro‐Architectural Tour*

Abstract

Fifteen sites in England today can be identified with Dr. Thomas Willis, the Oxford physician and anatomist, who was the founder of neurology. Four of these were domiciles; Beam Hall, where Willis and his colleagues met to study the brain and nerves, can be claimed as the first Neurological Institute. The last dwelling place of Willis is Westminster Abbey, where in 1961 his memorial stone was renewed by neurologists and neurosurgeons. Part of this original stone marks the new Brain Imaging Centre at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where the name of Thomas Willis shares a place in the Hall of Neurological Fame.     

“You've Got to Work on This Axon”: J. Z. Young and Squid Giant Axon Preparations in 20th-Century Neurobiology**

Employing and extending Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's analytical concept of epistemic things, this essay proposes one reason why squid giant axons, unusually large invertebrate nerve fibers, had such great impacts on twentieth-century neurobiology. The 1930s characterizations of these axons by John Zachary Young reshaped prevailing assumptions about nerve cells as epistemic things, I argue. Specifically, Young's preparations of these axons, which consisted of fibers attached to laboratory technologies, highlighted similarities between giant axons and more familiar ones via lines of comparative study common to aquatic biology. Young's work convinced other biologists that the squid giant fibers were, in fact, axons, despite their unusual fused (syncytial) structures, thereby promoting further studies, such as intracellular measurements, made possible by the fiber's size. Tracing direct relations between preparations of squid axons and broader interpretations of neurons as epistemic things, this paper renders an actors’ category, “preparations,” into an analytical one. In turn, it offers glimpses into how aquatic organisms shaped twentieth-century neurobiology and how local experiments can drive broader, disciplinary changes.     

Tribute to Frank C. Rose Lifetime Contribution Award 2002

Abstract

The origins of the neonatal neurological examination are described with their common basis attributable to evolutionary theory, the classical neurosciences, clinical neurology, and developmental psychology. It is shown that not only have the techniques of the bedside examination changed over the past half century but the purpose of the examination has also evolved; initially the examination was used to assess maturation of the developing infant, now it is used to determine whether cerebral pathology may be present and whether examination abnormalities are helpful in outcome assessment. The development of several of the current neonatal neurological examinations are reviewed and their clinical and scientific basis examined.