![]() The highly selective form of amnesia observed by Scoville & Milner (1957), after bilateral temporal lobe surgery in patient HM, provided one particularly striking example of specificity. ![]() One development was that advances from cognitive psychology, using its information-processing framework, led to new insights into the selective deficits of brain-damaged patients. Several key developments were to bring the neuroscience of higher mental processes into focus again, with a particular emphasis on specificity in the underlying brain mechanisms. This view often prevailed back then, even though Broca & Wernicke had reported on rather specific language deficits after particular brain damage in neurological patients considerably earlier (late nineteenth century). A student in the mid-twentieth century might have been taught simply that ‘association cortex’ is involved in higher mental processes, in some non-specific (or ‘mass action’) way. While studies of lower-level sensory and motor processes have been fairly well integrated with underlying physiology for over a century, this was not always so for higher mental processes. The computer revolution of the 1940s led in turn to a ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology during the 1950s and 1960s, with the focus upon information processing (via analogies to computers and programs) leading to an interest in internal mental processes, rather than just in the overt behaviour that had been the dominant concern of the preceding 50 years. ![]() Nevertheless, several historical markers can be identified approximately. Space constraints here preclude a comprehensive review of how the current layout of the field has arisen for study of mental processes in the human brain. Scientific study of the human mind and brain has apparently come of age in the past decade or so, with a series of remarkable methodological breakthroughs, and theoretical advances, in addition to an ever-growing number of empirical findings. biomedical, psychological and computational), in a highly interdisciplinary field. Nowadays, most cutting-edge research on human brain function fuses the three very different traditions or strands together (i.e. This approach has some historical roots in the development of intelligent machines during the computer revolution, but has since become a sophisticated mathematical branch of neuroscience. More recently, a further key approach has involved computational modelling of cognitive functions in the brain. These originally grew out of philosophy of mind, but then became determinedly experimental. In addition to the biomedical approach, studies of the human mind and brain have also benefited greatly from psychological approaches. Hence, this field has become a key part of biomedical science. Studies of human brain function (together with related animal studies) are thus critical for understanding major neurological and psychiatric disease. Disrupted brain function is also increasingly thought to underlie the major mental illnesses. Specific cognitive functions can be severely impaired, even while others remain intact in the same person. Many devastating and disabling conditions are a consequence of disrupted brain function, as in cases of dementia or following a stroke. ![]() In addition to being beneficiaries of the brain's complex functioning, people can also be victims of this. How can seemingly immaterial entities such as thoughts and memories arise from biological material? Advances in neuroscience have now led to wide acceptance in science and medicine that all aspects of our mental life-our perceptions, thoughts, memories, actions, plans, language, understanding of others and so on-in fact depend upon brain function. For centuries, the relation of the human mind to the brain has been debated.
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