Antidote to the Human Reptilian Brain

A History of the Brain tells the full story of neuroscience, from antiquity to the present day. It describes how we have come to understand the biological nature of the brain, beginning in prehistoric times, and the progress to the twentieth century with the development of modern neuroscience. This is the first time a history of the brain has been written in a narrative way, emphasising how our understanding of the brain and nervous system has developed over time, with the development of a number of disciplines including anatomy, pharmacology, physiology, psychology and neurosurgery. The book covers: • beliefs about the brain in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome • the Medieval period, Renaissance and Enlightenment • the 19th century • the most important advances in the 21st century and future directions in neuroscience. The discoveries leading to the development of modern neuroscience have given rise to one of the most exciting and fascinating stories in the whole of science. Written for readers with no prior knowledge of the brain or history, the book will delight students, and will also be of great interest to researchers and lecturers with an interest in understanding how we have arrived at our present knowledge of the brain. Andrew P. Wickens is Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. His main area of expertise is in biological psychology and neuroscience.

Current biology : CB, 2015

A Primer on the reptile brain, in particular the light it sheds on the structural and functional evolution of vertebrate neural circuits.

Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences, 2016

Some 320 million years ago (MYA), the evolution of a protective membrane surrounding the embryo, the amnion, enabled vertebrates to develop outside water and thus invade new terrestrial niches. These amniotes were the ancestors of today's mammals and sauropsids (reptiles and birds). Present-day reptiles are a diverse group of more than 10,000 species that comprise the sphenodon, lizards, snakes, turtles and crocodilians. Although turtles were once thought to be the most "primitive" among the reptiles, current genomic data point toward two major groupings: the Squamata (lizards and snakes) and a group comprising both the turtles and the Archosauria (dinosaurs and modern birds and crocodiles). Dinosaurs inhabited the Earth from the Triassic (230 MYA), at a time when the entire landmass formed a single Pangaea. Dinosaurs flourished from the beginning of the Jurassic to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous (65 MYA), and birds are their only survivors. What people generally call reptiles is thus a group defined in part by exclusion: it gathers amniote species that are neither mammals nor birds, making the reptiles technically a paraphyletic grouping. Despite this, the so-defined reptiles share many evolutionary, anatomical, developmental, physiological (e.g., ectothermia), and functional features. It is thus reasonable to talk about a "reptilian brain." Reptilian Brain Structure and Evolution The diversity of reptiles and their evolutionary relationship to mammals make reptilian brains great models to explore questions related to the structural and functional evolution of vertebrate neural circuits. To this end, comparative studies

Brain, 1999

This is not a tight discursive explanation but as the title expresses some musings inspired by a quote from the neuroscientist Dielenberg He discusses the so called higher versus the lower cognitive abilities. In this the brain plays the role of importance. But it at the same time begs the question into what exactly is the functional position of that highly valued organ. Is it indeed the source of all ingenuity or is rather a functional “organ” supporting a more general behavioural enterprise? It will be claimed that the assumption of being central originates from historical interpretations contrary to views inspired by biology and psychology.

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light evolution…” says Theodosius Dobzhansky, distinguished geneticist in Scientific American (Ewald, 1993). “Evolutionary biology is, of course, the scientific foundation for all biology, and biology is the foundation for all medicine. To a surprising degree, however, evolutionary biology is just now being recognized as a basic medical science…. The enterprise of studying medical problems in an evolutionary context has been termed Darwiniam medicine…. Darwinian medicine asks why the body is designed in a way that makes us all vulnerable to problems like cancer, atherosclerosis, depression, and choking, thus offering a broader context in which to do research.”

Progress in Brain Research, 2018

Abstract Contemporary neurosciences have grown beyond the limits of a natural science. To its most vocal advocates, the study of the human brain can provide nothing short of the basis for a new science of man—the link between the “natural” and “human” sciences—as a simple consequence of the growing mass of facts relating to this most marvelous organ, accumulated in the last four decades. This straightforward picture of the growing import of the neurosciences simplifies and obscures the myriad different interpretations and images of “the brain” that have inspired the development of the neurosciences. Among them, this chapter will consider two deeply contrasting early images of the brain: the cellular-physiological brain proposed since the 1950s by John Carew Eccles, and the model-“whole” brain championed by John Zachary Young. Eccles' program was focused on the vertebrate synapse, and Young's on the whole brain of an “advanced” invertebrate (the octopus). The former was the programmatic extension of a long neurophysiological tradition, and the latter an outspoken attempt at providing a revolutionary model for the organization of an unprecedented research effort. One underscored continuity and scientific “soundness,” and the other promised rupture and new, imaginative solutions to age-old problems. Nevertheless, they have been later lumped together into a single, marvelous and progressive history, or mythology, of the Science of the Brain. This chapter will show how the organizing principle of these two opposed (if almost equally successful) research efforts was not the foggy, ever-changing image of an experimental brain-in-becoming, but the clear, fixed horizon of a promised brain.

Personality and Individual Differences, 2014

and sharing with colleagues.

Brain evolution is a complex weave of species similarities and differences, bound by diverse rules and principles. This book is a detailed examination of these principles, using data from a wide array of vertebrates but minimizing technical details and terminology. It is written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and more senior scientists who already know something about "the brain," but want a deeper understanding of how diverse brains evolved. The book's central theme is that evolutionary changes in absolute brain size tend to correlate with many other aspects of brain structure and function, including the proportional size of individual brain regions, their complexity, and their neuronal connections. To explain these correlations, the book delves into rules of brain development and asks how changes in brain structure impact function and behavior. Two chapters focus specifically on how mammal brains diverged from other brains and how Homo sapiens evolved a very large and "special" brain.