Tag Archives: Ramon y Cajal

New Book & Touring Exhibit on Ramón y Cajal: The Beautiful Brain


The Beautiful Brain, a new book and touring exhibit documenting the work of Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal just launched. As the New York Times describes,

Decades before these technologies existed, a man hunched over a microscope in Spain at the turn of the 20th century was making prescient hypotheses about how the brain works. At the time, William James was still developing psychology as a science and Sir Charles Scott Sherrington was defining our integrated nervous system.

Meet Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an artist, photographer, doctor, bodybuilder, scientist, chess player and publisher. He was also the father of modern neuroscience.

More details on the book, The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
(By Larry Swanson, Eric Newman, Alfonso Araque, and Janet Dubinsky) can be found here, while the exhibit is scheduled to appear at the following locations:

The Beautiful Brain Tour Schedule
January 28 – May 21, 2017 | Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota
Minneapolis MN
September 5 – December 3, 2017 | Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
January 9 – March 31, 2018 | Grey Art Gallery, New York University
New York City, New York, USA
May 2, 2018 – January 1, 2019 | MIT museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
January 27 – April 7, 2019 | Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

New Issue: Psychologia Latina

The May 2012 issue of Psychologia Latina is now online. Included in this issue are four new articles on the history of psychology. In the issue’s three Spanish language articles the work of William James (right) on brain plasticity and habit is explored, the founding of the Interamerican Society of Psychology in the mid-twentieth century is described, and the history of the Freudian concept of “track switch” is discussed. In an English language article, the 1903 meeting at which both Pavlov introduced conditioned reflexes and Ramón y Cajal introduced the neuron theory is discussed. Full titles, authors, and abstracts, in both Spanish and English, follow below.

“Plasticidad Cerebral y Hábito en William James: un Antecedente para la Neurociencia Social,” (or, “Brain Plasticity and Habit in William James: an Antecedent for Social Neuroscience”) by Carlos María Alcover and Fernando Rodríguez Mazo. The abstract reads,

William James, in the chapter on the habits of “The Principles of Psychology” (1890) introduced as a key concept of plasticity of brain and nervous system. James could not study this phenomenon experimentally, but his proposal was derived from the results of contemporary research in different fields of Biology and Physiology. Plasticity refers to how learning, skill acquisition, interpersonal and social influences and other contextual variables can influence on the physical structure of the brain, modifying and establishing new relationships and neural circuits that in turn can impair their functioning. This concept was studied experimentally in the late Twentieth Century, and it’s a key concept in the current Social Neuroscience, a discipline that seeks to combine and integrate different conceptual and methodological elements from Neuroscience and Social Psychology. This analysis has allowed us, first, to emphasize the meaning and value that James gave to the concept of plasticity in its analysis of habit, and second, to review the meaning of this concept in modern Social Neuroscience, stressing background of the James’ hypotheses in the current concept of brain plasticity. Continue reading New Issue: Psychologia Latina

Golgi and Ramon y Cajal

Camillo GolgiSantiago Ramón y CajalThe blog Cocktail Party Physics has recently posted a piece with some basic coverage of two great neurologists from the past: Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal (see here and here for earlier AHP posts). As you may recall, Golgi, who invented a revolutionary technique for staining brain tissue, concluded that the brain consists of an interconnected web of fibers. Ramon y Cajal, using Golgi’s staining method, averred, by contrast, that the brain is made up of billions of separate cells — neurons. Ramón y Cajal turned out to be right, of course (at least by current lights), but he wouldn’t have been able to make the discovery without Golgi’s technique, so the two rivals shared the 1906 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. Continue reading Golgi and Ramon y Cajal