Neural integration at the mesoscopic level: The advent of some ideas in the last half century

Abstract

History seen by a professional historian, based only on the documented record, always incomplete and liable to bias, can be unreliable. Modern history seen by a protagonist must surely be among the most unreliable. Yet, I must try, in a limited scope, to show the human drama as well as the flood on which we are floating, unable to dump the baggage of past biases. Our points of view, priorities, and positions on all the controversial issues and even the well established, noncontroversial ones, are not as rational as we would like to think but are strongly conditioned by where we came from.

I will depend on selected vignettes of the way things looked when I was a student, a young postdoctoral fellow and an Assistant Professor, to compare with the way they look now, in each of half a dozen mesoscopic domains ‐ those in between the most basic subcellular or molecular and the higher levels of learning and cognition. The half dozen constitute, of course, anything but a representative fraction of neuroscience. But they add up to a nontrivial segment of the big picture with respect to the integrative aspects of our science. Most of the fronts that grew into today's popular branches are not represented, but a small set of particular interest and probability of further surprises.     

News Notes

The paper surveys the Russian aluminum industry during the turbulent transition years of the 1990s, and updates developments to the current period. The focus is on primary aluminum production, with emphasis on the key topics of ownership and governance, output and performance, costs of production (dominated by energy and transportation), investments, technology, and alumina and bauxite inputs. Considerable attention is devoted to elucidating the corporate strategies of the two dominant Russian aluminum companies emerging by the end of the period—Rusal and SUAL. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F21, L61, L72. 1 figure, 4 tables, 79 references.     

Nature and Technology in History

This essay sketches an expanded theoretical conception of the roles of nature and technology in history, one that is based on a social ontology that does not separate nature and society. History has long been viewed as the realm of past human action. On this conception, nature is treated largely as an Other of history, and technology is construed chiefly as a means for human fulfillment. There is no history of nature, and the history of technology becomes the history of useful products. The essay discusses the changes wrought in these understandings by a social ontology that depicts social existence as inherently transpiring in nexuses of practices and material arrangements. The first implication is that the domain of history should be expanded from the realm and course of past human activity to the realm and course of past practice‐arrangement nexuses. In turn, this wider conception transforms the significance of nature and technology in history. Until recently, most accounts of the relationship between society/history and nature have presumed that society and history are separate from nature. On my account, by contrast, nature is part of society: a component of the practice—arrangement nexuses through which social life progresses. Human history, consequently, is a social—natural history that encompasses the varying presence and roles of nature in human coexistence. Technology, meanwhile, is not just useful products, and not just a mediator of society/history and nature. It also is (1) something through which humans manage social life and the nature that is part of it, largely by drawing nature into this site and thereby conjointly transforming society, technology, and nature in history; and (2) something that, over time, plays an increasingly central role in the nexuses where social life transpires. Through technology, in short, social—natural history takes form and advances.