FoundationalConceptsNeuroscience

French edition in 1664: L’Homme de René Descartes. The publication very nearly never happened. Descartes died in 1650 in Stockho ...

was trying to understand how this happens. In the 1600s, one idea was that this type of action was driven by fluid pressure of s ...

movement of charged particles. That process is described in detail in Chapter 5. In Descartes’s time, descriptions of electricit ...

Figure 2.13. Visual perception and the action of pointing a finger, from L’Homme de René Descartes (1664). In the late 1700s, th ...

Galvani’s suggestion that neural signaling was electrical in nature continued to catch on. Around 1850, the German physician and ...

Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), working in their respective countries of Italy and Spain at the end of the nineteenth and be ...

Figure 2.14. Two figures from Galvani’s 1791 publication, depicting experi- mental devices and arrangements, together with disse ...

(^) (^) oe 4 Figure 2.16. Human cerebellar neurons drawn by Golgi (left) and neurons from human cerebral cortex drawn by Ramon y ...

ron in a small piece of brain tissue was stained in this way, the result would be a glob of dark-colored mess, so densely packed ...

The mind engages. ...

CHAPTER 3 Chemistry and Life To understand how nerve cells work—how they generate signals and pass information from one cell to ...

Among the alchemists of old were metalworkers who “magically” extracted metals from rock, and physicians who prepared extracts a ...

today and set forth what he believed to be a comprehensive listing of all the chemical elements known in his time. Life was not ...

(^) (^) 1 H He 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Li | Be Bi|C|N{O|F |Ne W 12 13 14 16 16 17 18 Na | Mg Al | Si | P| S | Cl} Ar 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 ...

water. A molecule of water is made of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen: HO. A typical living human body is composed ...

However, with all those H2O molecules gone, carbon would assume first place in the list of elemental abundances represented as p ...

that are completely filled with electrons and tend to neither gain nor lose electrons. Because chemical interactions between ele ...

to represent molecules. This is a diagrammatic language that may look mysterious and obscure when you don’t know the rules (as a ...

let’s start simple. Consider a molecule that is a bit more complex than water, but not too much so—a small organic molecule comp ...

H H H H H H Methane Ethane Propane H H H H HH H H H H H H H H I I I I 1 | | I | l | I | I Haerbe I | 1 ett! | | METS tpg H H H H ...