Research into brain development has come a long way since it began as shown below via the use of a timeline:

4000 BC – Sumerian records show first writing on the brain in the world.

2500 BC – The Egyptians come to believe that the heart is more important than the brain and as a result discard it through the process of mummification.

450 BC – Alcmaeon was an early Greek physician who was the first to use anatomic dissection of animals as a basis for his theories. He concluded from his experiments that the brain is the central organ of sensation and thought which opposed the idea of the Egyptians.

 335 BC – Aristotle came to the same conclusion that the heart is the main organ of thought and sensation and that the brain is simply a “radiator designed to cool it.” He also firmly believes in the fact that the basis of thought cannot be found within the body. He then began to look into short-term memory and long-term memory and how they differ.

1664 – Thomas Wills a professor from Oxford wrote the worlds first monograph on brain autonomy and physiology. His book highlights that the cerebral hemispheres (which make up 70% of the human brain) determine thought and action. He then states that these are completely different from any other parts of the bbrain and control basic motor skills. He is first to introduce words which are now associated with the brain such as: lobe, corpus striatum and neurology.

1848 – Phineas Gage was a railroad worker who was at work when an explosion occurred and caused an iron rod to pierce the frontal lobe of his brain. Despite surviving there were significant changes to his mood and behavior. It was then suggested by researchers that the vital parts of the personality reside in the frontal lobe. It was this that saw the introduction of the lobotomy procedure which consisted of removing portions of the frontal lobe in order to hopefully cure mental illness and depression.

1869 – Sir Francis Galton came to the conclusion that intelligence was an inherited trait and high levels of intellectual achievement are passed down generations through genetics. He wrote about this idea in his book the ‘Hereditary Genius.’

1875 – Wilhem Windt set up the first lab which researched human behavior. He then carried out a study regarding attention and the sensory process.

1905 – Alfred Binet was a French psychologist and completely disagreed with Galton’s use of sensory discrimination to explain intelligence. He believed that an individual’s intelligence could be detected from processes such as memory, comprehension, attention, memory and imagination. Binet along with Theadore Simon then proceeded to make a scale of intelligence which was published in 1905.

1911- A British neuroscientist, Henry Head publishes ‘Studies in Neurology’ which focused on spatial awareness.

1929 – The first human electroencephalograph was carried out by Hans Berger. This was used to measure the record of the electrical activity in the human brain.

1950 – An American neuropsychologist Karl Spencer Lashley carried out an experiment with rats to attempt to reveal neural components of memory which he named engrams. From his findings he concluded that there is no definitive area for memory in the brain.

 1974 – M.E Phelps, E.J Hoffman and M.M TER Pogossian created the world’s first Positron Emission Topography (PET) scanner. The function of this machine was to provide visual information about the activity of the brain.

1987 – Prozac is introduced to and becomes a treatment for depression.

1990 – US President George Bush declares this decade as the ‘Decade of the Brain’

1997- Stanley B. Prusiner wins Nobel Prize for his discovery of a new genre of infectious agents called prions. This research went onto help provide important insights into researching illnesses such as dementia specifically Alzheimer’s.

2000 – Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for their findings relating to signal transduction in the nervous system.

2014 – John O’Keefe, Edvard Moser, and May-Britt Moser share the Nobel Prize for their research into cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain