Brain and Behavior

Mental Illness• In ancient Mesopotamia, mental illness was believed

to be caused by demonic possession.• Priest-doctors treated the mentally ill with

magical/religious (e.g., exorcisms, incantations, prayer, atonement) and other mystical rituals intended to drive out the evil spirit.

Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus1700 BC

Ancient Egyptians - oldest written record using the word "brain”.• 48 cases studies• injured by falls (maybe from working

on monuments or buildings)• victims of battle (many wounds

appear to be caused by spears, clubs or daggers).

Imhotep

Aristotle – Heart is the most important organ in the body.

• Mental Functions located in the heart.• Lungs and brain simply existed to cool the heart.• Based on studies of chick embryos• Held that people with heavy upper bodies were

intellectually dull due to the extra weight bearing on the heart.

Ancient Greece

Epilepsy considered a divine punishment for sinners. Depending on the symptoms the Greeks would attribute the fits to a different deity such as Cybele, Poseidon, Mars, Hekate, Hermes or Apollo. According to the Hippocratic texts, for example, if the symptoms included teeth gnashing or convulsions on the right side, then epilepsy was attributed to Cybele, whereas if the patient screamed like a horse, then god Poseidon was to blame.

According to Plutarch (50-120 A.D.), all babies in ancient Sparta were examined by a council of the elders; epileptic babies were left to Apothetae, a short chasm of the mountain Taygetus (Plutarch, 1914).

Hippocrates (circa 400 BC)

• The theory of the Four Humors of the body, ~ blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm, involved a principle of balance.

• Health was a consequence of balance between the four humors, while disease or sickness was the result of an imbalance.

• Argued medicine is not philosophy, and therefore must be practiced on a case-by-case basis rather than from first principles.

Also argued that “epilepsy” was not a divine disease, but had physical causes.

Four Humors

Galen of Pergamon 130 – 200 AD

• medical training in Smyrna and Alexandria.• surgeon to the gladiators of Pergamos.• physician of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius• searched for physiological reasons for

different behaviors in humans.

The Nine Temperaments

• Based on four humors but allowed for nine possible “temperaments” based on the levels of the four humors. In the four least desirable temperaments, one characteristic dominated the other three. In four others, a pair of temperaments dominate the other two. Galen referred to these as either “sanguine”, “choleric”, “melancholy”, and “phlegmatic”. In the ideal temperament, all four humors are balanced.

Psycho-Surgery

Brain surgery is perhaps the oldest of the practiced medical arts. Evidence from as early as 5100 BC

Trepanation is the removal of a piece of skull with out damage to the underlying blood-vessels, meninges and brain.

• earliest trepanned skulls, the holes were made by scraping the bone away with sharp stones.

• later, primitive drilling tools were • used to drill small holes arranged in

circles, after which the piece of bone inside the circle was removed.

• The late Medieval period - introduction of mechanical drilling and sawing instruments,

• The procedure was used as a treatment for conditions such as headaches, epilepsy, hydrocephalus and mental disorders.

These were presumably attributed to possession by evil demons, such that a hole in the skull would have provided the spirits a passage for escape.

Stone of Madness

A curious belief held by some in the Middle Ages was that mental illness was caused by a “stone of madness” situated anywhere in the body, but most commonly in the head. Many quack healers roamed Europe performing sham operations on the mentally ill, removing the stone, and affecting a cure, which, presumably, was very short-lived.

Hieronymus Bosch c. 1494Pieter Bruegel, c. 1550Jan Sanders van Hemessen, c. 1550

Physiognomy

Physical features directly related to personality and

mental processes

Franz Joseph Gall1758 - 1828

• That moral and intellectual faculties are innate • That their exercise or manifestation depends on

organization • That the brain is the organ of all the propensities,

sentiments and faculties • That the brain is composed of as many particular

organs as there are propensities, sentiments and faculties which differ essentially from each other.

• That the form of the head or cranium represents the form of the brain, and thus reflects the relative development of the brain organs.

  

 

He was a pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain. Around 1800, he developed "cranioscopy", a method to divine the personality and development of mental and moral faculties on the basis of the external shape of the skull.

Claimed there are some 26 "organs" on the surface of the brain which affect the contour of the skull, including a "murder organ" present in murderers. Brain organs that were used got bigger and those which were not used shrunk, causing the skull to rise and fall with organ development. Gall's early work was with criminals and the insane and his brain "organs" reflected this interest. Phrenology

-phrenological theories best accepted in England, where ruling class used it to justify the inferiority of colonial subjects.

Debunking

Napoleon Bonaparte was furious because Gall's interpretation of his skull "missed" some noble qualities he thought he had.In 1808, the Institute of France assembled a committee of savants. - declared phrenology was not to be trusted.

Pierre Flourens 1794- 1867

Ablation and stimulation methods and many experimental investigations on mammalian species, especially rabbits and pigeons.

Removing Cerebellum which Gall claimed was the organ of amativeness (sexual love) from dogs, did not make them less amorous, but did impair their co-ordination.

1838 - 1911

Phrenology remainedPopular in the United States from 1820 to 1850

Bumps(1932)

Phrenology remained a POP Science into the 1930’s

Quack Quack!!• Phrenology gave rise to the invention of the

psychograph by Lavery and White, a machine which could do a phrenological reading complete with printout. It is said that this device netted its owners about $200,000 at the 1934 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.

AnthropometryIn the 19th and early 20th centuries, used mainly to classify potential criminals by facial characteristics. Cesare Lombroso "Criminal Anthropology" 1895, associated certain craniofacial features to criminal types. (e.g., murderers have prominent jaws, and that pickpockets have long hands and scanty beards). Popular among the police and judicial systems in Italy and in many other countries.

Well until the 30s, many judges ordered "lombrosian" anthropometric analyses of defendants in criminal charges, which were used against them by the prosecution in the trial procedures.

Craniology

Influential during the Victorian era, Used by the British to justify racism and dominance of "inferior people", such as the Irish and the black tribes of Africa. "Inferior" races were said to be similar to apes and monkeys, so that they were considered to be more kin to these animals than the main European people (such as the Anglo-Saxon, of course...).

Jonh Beddoe, the founder and president of the British Anthropological Institute, The Races of Man" (1862), developed "Index of Nigressence", stated that the Irish had crania similar to those of the Cro-Magnon pre-historic men and thus were a kind of "Africanoid" white race !

High Brow/Low Brow

National Hygiene Department in the Ministry of the Interior and in the Bureau for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare, proposed the "scientific" classification of Arians and non-Arians Official craniometric certification required by law “Many persons were sent to the death camps or denied marriage or work as a result of this "mismeasurement“. Stephen Jay Gould

Localization of Function

As it turns out, Gall and the phrenologists were correct when it came to the central debate of neurology of the time. The brain is compartmentalized, with each piece serving a specific function modern map is based on fundamental functions, such as Broca’s and Werinike’s Areas.

Phineas P. Gage

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