NEUR30003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Cogito Ergo Sum, Myelin, Lesion
10 May 2018
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Lecture 1
• 1. The aims of this subject are: i) to appreciate the scope and context of neuroscience ii) to
understand how the nervous system can be studied by considering the capacities and limitations of
different methods of investigation, and the status of the information they provide; iii) to appreciate
of how the cells of the nervous system are specialised for information processing, and how
they combine to form circuits and networks. iv) to understand the structural and functional
organization of the human nervous system.
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• 2. Early views (from Ancient Egyptians through to Aristotle and up to the Enlightenment) of
the brain did not give it a role in thought or experience; these functions were ascribed to the
heart. Hippocrates, in Ancient Greece, then Galan, in Ancient Rome, appreciated the role of
the brain in experience and behaviour, but saw its function in terms of the 4 humours of the
body. Beginning around the fourteenth century, careful observation of post-mortem brain
revealed details of neural tissue but still the functional basis of the nervous system was
thought to involve its influence of fluid in the body. Neurologists in the nineteenth century
described associations between behavioural deficits and lesions in the brain tissue.
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• 3. Although "experiments of nature" had long provided anecdotal evidence of brain function,
the rise of Neurology as a medical discipline allowed the structured analysis of brain disease
and injury and how this manifests as signs and symptoms.
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• 4. Much of the nervous system is dedicated to the production and control of movement - less
obvious is the huge amount of neural control of the body through homeostatic regulation of
physiological functions.
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• 5. While many actions of the nervous system are explicable in terms of the known properties
of neurons and the circuits they form, the means by which the action of the brain produces
consciousness is a deep mystery.
• Rene Descartes: you know, with certainty, that you are thinking - cogito ergo sum
• Ergo sum - “I think therefore I am/exist”
• When we are aware of thought, we recognise our mental existence (it’s hard to doubt
we exist: we would have to concede the existence of that thought, and the entity
experiencing the thought)
• Thinking is undeniable aspect/proof of existence
• Part of the nature of thought is that it seems to be a private experience - your thought
furnishes your definition of “you”
• What else are we aware of?
• 1) a universe in which we are embedded actors
• 2) a variety of attributes about ourselves - what we might call our internal state or
how we are feeling
• 3) a capacity for action - can do stuff/interact with world
• All of these facts come from nervous system, brain is generating all of these
• What a long history of enquiry has revealed - you could say it is a principle of
neuroscience - is that all these properties, these attributes of “the mind”, are a
product of the operation of the nervous system, brain is responsible for everything
(we experience or that we are aware of)
• Through most of recorded history, what we now recognise as the action of the
nervous system, has focused mostly on the conscious properties (the mind) and not
always on the brain as its provider
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• Hippocrates
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• Galen
• Humors = fluids
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