IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB395383059

“The Sleeping Beauty of the Brain”: Memory, MIT, Montreal, and the Origins of Neuroscience (2021)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 112
Issue: 1
Pages: 22-44

DOI: 10.1086/713795

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/713795

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

This essay traces the simultaneous development of two distinct efforts to unify the brain sciences in the twentieth century—one originating at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and the other at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Both efforts coalesced around investigations of memory but displayed profoundly different disciplinary styles. At the MNI, investigations of memory loss in surgical patients crystallized a form of brain research that eventually became the paradigm of interdisciplinarity for the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO). At MIT, meanwhile, the biophysicist Francis Schmitt aimed to transcend the different brain and mind sciences by discovering a “memory molecule” akin to DNA—this became the basis for his Neurosciences Research Program (NRP). While both organizations failed to achieve the unification they desired, IBRO and the NRP did achieve a social unification of the brain sciences in the 1960s. IBRO established much of the social capital for the Society for Neuroscience, and the NRP promoted the possibilities of a new transdisciplinary “neuroscience.” Beyond reframing the history of modern neuroscience, the story of the MNI/IBRO, the NRP, and the problem of memory can help us to examine different and contrasting approaches to “interdisciplinarity” in twentieth-century science.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB395383059/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Pogliano, Claudio; (2012)
Penfield's Homunculus and Other Grotesque Creatures from the Land of If (/isis/citation/CBB001250358/)

Article Youjung Shin; (2023)
For or against the molecularization of brain science?: Cybernetics, interdisciplinarity, and the unprogrammed beginning of the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT (/isis/citation/CBB401335998/)

Article Eling, Paul; Hofman, Michel A.; (2014)
The Central Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam and Its Directors (/isis/citation/CBB001420777/)

Book Richard Leblanc; William Feindel; (2016)
The Wounded Brain Healed: The Golden Age of the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1934-1984 (/isis/citation/CBB523785069/)

Article Annmarie Adams; (2019)
Designing Penfield: Inside the Montreal Neurological Institute (/isis/citation/CBB347960746/)

Book Frank W. Stahnisch; (2020)
A New Field in Mind: A History of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Brain Sciences (/isis/citation/CBB376085655/)

Article Lichterman, Boleslav L.; (2010)
The Moscow Colloquium on Electroencephalography of Higher Nervous Activity and Its Impact on International Brain Research (/isis/citation/CBB001034923/)

Article Nicolas, Serge; Guida, Alessandro; Levine, Zachary; (2014)
Psychological and Anthropological Study of a Mental Calculator (/isis/citation/CBB001420780/)

Book Richter, Jochen; (2000)
Rasse, Elite, Pathos: Eine Chronik zur medizinische Biographie Lenins und zur Geschichte der Elitegehirnforschung in Dokumenten (/isis/citation/CBB000410034/)

Book Kreft, Gerald; (2005)
Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte und Hirnforschung: Ludwig Edingers Neurologisches Institut in Frankfurt am Main (/isis/citation/CBB001033123/)

Book Pollard, Ernest C.; (1982)
Radiation: One story of the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory (/isis/citation/CBB000008034/)

Chapter Koepnick, Lutz; (2008)
Unvergesslich? Science-Fiction und die Zukunft der Erinnerung (/isis/citation/CBB001024362/)

Article Elisabetta Sirgiovanni; Marco Cilione; (2022)
Memory in Contemporary Biomedicine: Cross-Disciplinary Scenarios (/isis/citation/CBB643187129/)

Book Winter, Alison; (2012)
Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (/isis/citation/CBB001251122/)

Article Richard Leblanc; (2019)
The White Paper: Wilder Penfield, the Stream of Consciousness, and the Physiology of Mind (/isis/citation/CBB650149989/)

Article Josef Hlade; (2021)
Reconsidering “Brain mythology” (/isis/citation/CBB117316646/)

Article Cornelius Borck; (2016)
How we may think: Imaging and writing technologies across the history of the neurosciences (/isis/citation/CBB917883611/)

Article Pareti, Germana; (2017)
Le radici lontane della neuroscienza delle reti. (/isis/citation/CBB948024614/)

Book Hagner, Michael; (1999)
Ecce Cortex: Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns (/isis/citation/CBB000110603/)

Thesis Wan, Vincent; (2012)
Historical Causes and Map Visualizations in Biology (/isis/citation/CBB001567367/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}