文档介绍：Introduction
I am an experimental neuroscientist specializing in brain mechanisms in vision,
and a teacher of neuroscience. This introduction explains what led me tempo-
rarily to put aside my experiments and neglect my students to write the ªve
tales on the history of neuroscience.
The ªrst essay began in 1960. I had pleted the experimental work
for my . thesis, “Some Alterations in Behavior after Frontal Lesions in
Monkeys,” at Cambridge University and sat down to write the requisite review
of the literature. Six months later I had reached Galen and the second century.
At that point, my advisor, Larry Weiskrantz, suggested that, actually, it might
be better if I got on with the write-up of my experiments, even though, as I
explained to him, Galen had carried out experiments on frontal lobe damage
in piglets. So I never included this historical survey in my thesis, and ultimately
its review of previous work began with studies in the 1930s.
I did show my “up to Galen” manuscript to Joseph Needham. He wrote
me an encouraging note, resplendent with Chinese characters, comparing Greek
pneuma with Chinese chi. After graduate school I went to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Hans-Lukas
Teuber, the charismatic founder of the Department of Psychology, now the
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Gross, 1994a). I showed him my
Introduction
history manuscript and proposed to continue working on it on the side. Teuber
was deeply knowledgeable about the history of biology, almost as deeply as he
pretended to be; however, he assured me that I had no time “on the side” and
should save history for my retirement days.
Despite this advice, when I began to teach what became my perennial
undergraduate course on physiological psychology (later renamed cognitive
neuroscience), ªrst at Harvard and then at Princeton, I increasingly inserted
historical interludes on Vesalius, Willis, and Gall, and oth