Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 16

Mapping the brain’s relationship to “faculties of mind” had been a favorite pastime of neurologists since the 19th century, which had spawned the heyday of phrenology.

It all began with the observations of the Viennese neuro-anatomist, Francis J. Gall (1758–1828). Gall performed autopsies on patients who had displayed ailments that could possibly be related to their brains and correlated the brain pathology he found to the disturbed behavior. He then mapped his resulting correlations and the maps became ever more intricate as his observations multiplied. This situation was complicated by decades-long popular fascination during which observations of the location of bumps on the head were substituted for dissections of the brain at autopsy.

Although I had been convinced by my own neuro-surgical training and experience that useful correlations could be made relating specific behavioral disturbances to specific brain systems, these 19th- and early 20th-century maps of brain-behavioral relationships seemed ridiculous. Cognitive faculties, emotional attributes and elementary movements were assigned locations in the brain cortex in a more or less haphazard fashion.