Search Results

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the many contributions of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who is considered the father of modern neuroscience. He published almost 300 articles and several books of great importance, such as the classics Textura del Sistema Nervioso del Hombre y de los Vertebrados (1899-1904) and Estudios Sobre la Degeneración y Regeneración del Sistema Nervioso (1913-1914). He also received numerous awards and distinctions, including some of the most prestigious awards of his time: the Moscow Award (1900); the Helmholtz Gold Medal (1905); and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (1906). The chapter then goes on to discuss why scientists often referred to trees and forests in their descriptions of the brain and, in particular, of the cerebral cortex, and how these neuronal forests served as an unlimited source of artistic and poetic inspiration to many scientists.

This chapter first focuses on Alain Prochiantz, professor at the École Normale Supérieure, and his lab’s efforts to think about the adult human brain in embryogenetic terms. It then covers the emergence of (cellular) cerebral pathology from 1820s to 1870s; Ramón y Cajal’s large-scale study of the cellular emergence of the brain in its entirety beginning in the early 1890s; the emergence of new concepts of plasticity and pathology in the mid-1960s; studies on the relevance of adult neurogenesis for rethinking the diseases of the brain, specifically depression; and the rise of adult neurogenesis research, arguably the fastest growing branch of neuroscience between 2000 and 2010.

This chapter narrates the discovery of dendritic spines. It begins with Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish professor of Pathology and Histology, and his work entitled Estractura delos centros nerviosos de la aves (Structure of the Nervous Centers in Birds) and how he discovered the spines using the Golgi technique. Cajal defined “spine” on the spines of a rose bush, as it resembled one when he first investigated it in Purkinje cells.

This chapter discusses the author's research methodology to address the question: What venues for living a life, for being neurologically human, have the neuronal sciences opened up since 1891, when Wilhelm Waldeyer introduced the term neuron? He began by studying the genealogy of morals by turning to Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose histology marked the emergence of the neurological human. What Ramón y Cajal then found when he set out to transform the development of the nervous system into a linear series of ink-pen drawings was that neurons must be thought of as instances of a free growth. From Ramón y Cajal, he then turned to German cytoarchitecture to study the cybernetic theories of the brain.

This chapter describes the development of a neuroscience project at Ross informed by literature and art. This project explores how a metaphor can serve as a trigger for interdisciplinary work in a school. Students started with Ramón y Cajal's scientific metaphor equating neurons to butterflies. This served as a launching pad for a series of scholarly investigations ranging from a linguistic analysis of the word butterfly in different contexts, to a review of scientific and other texts about butterflies, to time in the laboratory viewing neurons under the microscope. Students combined their skills about technology, art, neurobiology, and literature to create a digital video that converted the original metaphor into a living, visual form. This project illustrates the beauty of interdisciplinary learning, as well as the role of the spiral curriculum in transforming students' engagement in learning.

The electrical aspect of the function of spines is explored in this chapter. Ramón y Cajal was the first one who proposed the idea of the electrical function of the spine, as he believed that the spine stores electric energy (Ramón y Cajal, 1904). This hypothesis was picked up 50 years later by Chang, who suggested that spines have electrical resistance, hence can attenuate synaptic inputs. It then explained that there are two categories of electrical property models of spines: the active and passive, according to whether they assume the presence of voltage-dependent conductances in spines. The chapter concludes by explaining that the electrical roles of spines has important repercussions for the function of the neuron, and it is likely that better knowledge of the electrical role of spines will change the general understanding of how neurons work.