Your Brain Through…History: the eyes have it

You’re probably familiar with the basic story of how vision is supposed to work: photons of light are reflected from objects and interact with specialised photoreceptor cells in your retina, that outermost part of your visual system that filters and extracts features of the incoming stimuli.

Even if the jargon is modern, the basic idea isn’t new. It’s what’s know as the intromission theory of vision, and it casts your eyes as essentially passive sensors of incoming information and has been proposed in one form another since Democritus, Aristotle, Epicurus and Lucretius [1]. Historically, there was an alternative extramission theory, held by such luminaries as Alcmaeon [1], Plato and Empedocles, for whom there was a kind of fire projected from the eyes which interacted with objects and resulted in ‘seeing’.

Your Brain Through…History: its rubbish, basically

When you study, if you’re anything like me,  it can be difficult to retain details in the form of lists of obscurely related facts. I find it’s helpful to know a bit of the history of the thing you are studying, beyond just immediate facts, as a kind of scaffold to hook the details onto: Why were they interested in that? What was the motivation? Why was this approach used?

I forget precisely who, and my google-fu hasn’t been strong enough to locate it, but someone once said:

Learning biology is like a helix: you have to keep coming around and around and around.

In keeping with this idea, I’ve long been on the lookout for a good single volume history of neuroscience.  I found it recently in the form  of Andrew P. Wickens’ A History of the Brain: from Stone Age surgery to modern neuroscience.