George Oliver, Adrenaline Junky Physician

If you don't have test animals, you always have family...

"One of the most significant discoveries began with some personal observations by George Oliver, an English physician. Oliver had a penchant for inventing simple instruments and testing them on himself and his family members. He tried to invent an instrument for measuring the diameter of an artery under the skin. To test the sensitivity of his new device, he administered extracts from various animal glands to his young son and recorded changes in his arteries. To his surprise, injecting adrenal gland extract caused a large artery from which he was recording to narrow dramatically, raising his blood pressure." from Stanley Finger's Minds Behind the Brain

When Did Textbook Neuroscience Get Its Start?

How do you count revolutions in a science?

One of the signs that your work has become part of the prevailing paradigm is that your findings appear in a textbook. It would stand to reason that uncovering a field's first textbook would reveal its first paradigm and that the progressive displacement of content across textbooks would reveal paradigm shifts.

We normally think of textbooks as being a fairly recent form of (very lucrative) publication. But textbooks have been around for a very long time. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus of ancient Egypt records some of the earliest neurological observations. Galen's writings are some of the earliest we have on Greek and Roman medicine (Galen was a Roman).

Which of Galen's treatises would an ancient student of the brain go to as their authority? Not being a Galen scholar, I don't know the answer to this question, but it would be nice to know. The answer to this question might not only point to the dawn of neuroscience, but to its first revolution as well.

Jevons and Menger, Discoverers of Diminishing Marginal Utility

I've been interested in exchanges of ideas between the neuroscience of motivation and economic theory for some time. The field of neuroeconomics of course is the current forum for such exchanges. I came across some of the first mentions of diminishing marginal utility in economics today and thought they were worth an entry.

"Every appetite or sense is more or less rapidly satiated. A certain quantity of an object received, a further quantity is indifferent to us, or may even excite disgust. Every successive application will commonly excite the feelings less intensely than the previous application. The utility of the last supply of an object, then, usually decreases in some proportion, or as some function of the whole quantity received. This variation theoretically existing even in the smallest quantities, we must recede to infinitesimals, and what we shall call the coefficient of utility, is the ratio between the last increment or infinitely small supply of the object, and the increment of pleasure which it occasions, both, of course, estimated in their appropriate units." William Jevons, A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862)


"The satisfaction of every man's need for food up to the point where his life is thereby assured has the full importance of the maintenance of his life. Consumption exceeding this amount, again up to a certain point, has the importance of preserving his health (that is, his continuing well-being). Consumption extending beyond even this point has merely the importance--as observation shows--of a progressively weaker pleasure, until it finally reaches a certain limit at which the satisfaction of the need for food is so complete that every further intake of food contributes neither to the maintenance of life nor the preservation of health--nor does it give pleasure to the consumer, becoming first a matter of indifference to him, eventually a cause of pain, a danger to his health, a danger to life itself." Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871)

Experimental Design--Where in the Hell Did it Come From?

Lately, I've been interested in learning something about the history of statistical experimental design. This has led me to Stigler's The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900. Interesting book. Apparently Legendre introduced Least Squares in 1805, quite some time after the rise of Francis Bacon's experimental philosophy. I'm under the impression that the first book in experimental design was Ronald Fisher's The Design of Experiments (1935). The lag between developments in the logic of experiment and experimentalism is pretty astounding.

Where Do You Start in Studying History of Neuroscience?

I want to build a bibliography of books that would help someone get a good introduction to the history of neuroscience. Single authored volumes are what I'm looking for. Here's what I've got:

• Finger, The Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function 
  
• Finger, Minds behind the brain : a history of the pioneers and their discoveries
• Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts
• Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions

Other recommendations?

Tools for Neuroscience Bibliometrics

I'm testing out tools for doing neuroscience bibliometrics to test the fruitfulness of co-citation as a method for identifying a community of researchers working in the same field of neuroscience under the same research model. The availability of software for identifying co-citation networks promises to simplify protocols for identifying communities of science researchers. Such protocols would make it easier to re-identify research communities. This capacity to re-identify research communities is critical if sociologists of science are going to be able to engage in systematic and unbiased research. How are you supposed to be able to tell that I've accurately represented what a community of researchers is doing if I can't tell you how to find them? Furthermore, why should I believe that you've identified an actual community unless you can tell me what unifies them? I think that bibliometrics can help to answer these questions.

Presently, I'm testing out CiteSpaceII, using my MacBook. The software has proven to be very buggy and finicky about which browser I use. For example, I can't open CiteSpaceII using FireFox, but I can open it using Safari. However, when I do open CiteSpace, the GUI is compressed, buttons are squashed and labels are hard to read. Apparently, these problems do not arise on a Windows system. Not sure what CiteSpaceII looks like on a Linux system.

Because CiteSpaceII doesn't like my Mac, I'm now looking into using NetworkWorkbench. The documentation appears to be more extensive and NetworkWorkbench appears to be able to do whatever CiteSpaceII can do. NetworkWorkbench does not appear to have the same kinds of compatibility issues.

Verging on Superblindsight?

Blindsight occurs when people have a blind spot in their visual field, due to cortical damage, but with some prodding, retain the capacity to guess (better than chance) that a stimulus has been presented to the blind spot. Apparently, at least one blindsight case who appears to have no awareness of visual perception can nevertheless navigate a hallway littered with obstacles.

In recent research led by Krystel Huxlin, it was shown that people who suffer from blindsight can learn to detect a variety of different types of stimuli presented to their blind spot (scotoma). Reuters offers a brief write-up of Huxlin et al's results. I've posted the abstract from Huxlin et al's paper for some additional details.

Krystel Huxlin et al (2009) "Perceptual Relearning of Complex Visual Motion after V1 Damage in Humans" The Journal of Neuroscience 29(13):3981-3991.

Damage to the adult, primary visual cortex (V1) causes severe visual impairment that was previously thought to be permanent, yet several visual pathways survive V1 damage, mediating residual, often unconscious functions known as "blindsight." Because some of these pathways normally mediate complex visual motion perception, we asked whether specific training in the blind field could improve not just simple but also complex visual motion discriminations in humans with long-standing V1 damage. Global direction discrimination training was administered to the blind field of five adults with unilateral cortical blindness. Training returned direction integration thresholds to normal at the trained locations. Although retinotopically localized to trained locations, training effects transferred to multiple stimulus and task conditions, improving the detection of luminance increments, contrast sensitivity for drifting gratings, and the extraction of motion signal from noise. Thus, perceptual relearning of complex visual motion processing is possible without an intact V1 but only when specific training is administered in the blind field. These findings indicate a much greater capacity for adult visual plasticity after V1 damage than previously thought. Most likely, basic mechanisms of visual learning must operate quite effectively in extrastriate visual cortex, providing new hope and direction for the development of principled rehabilitation strategies to treat visual deficits resulting from permanent visual cortical damage.