History of Cognitive Neuroscience
In the 70's Michael Gazzaniga and George Miller were riding in the back of a taxi in New York City on their way to a dinner for those who were studying how the brain enables the mind. That is when they came up with the term cognitive neuroscience. Cognition, meaning the process of knowing or how we came to knowing something and neuroscience, which is the study of the nervous system. Essentially, cognitive neuroscience means how the brain enables the mind.
The Brain Story
Localization and topographic maps are very important ideas when studying the brain. Localization is the idea that certain areas of the brain are responsible for specific things. Topographic organization is the belief that the brain is ordered in an orderly fashion that moves from one part to another. Topographic mapping also supports the idea of localization. A study that supports the idea of localization was when Paul Broca was treating a patient with damage to the left inferior frontal lobe. The patient could understand language but he was not able to speak. Carl Wernicke treated a patient with damage to the area where the parietal and temporal lobes meet. The patient had the opposite symptoms as Broca's patient. This patient could speak but they made little sense when speaking. These findings were a huge step in the study of the brain.
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