Following up from the lecture on the Physical Child: Brain Development with Will, I have looked further into the development and research on the brain that has evolved over the 20th century. To do this, I used a really helpful website that I found which displayed a timeline of all the brain development research up to the year 2000.
1905 – Santiago Ramon y Cajal and Camille Golgi win the Nobel Prize for their research on the structure and function of nerve cells.
1911 – Henry Head (British Neuroscientist) publishes ‘Studies in Neurology’. Within this, he conducts relevant studies with neurologist Gordon Holmes on the neurophysiology of sensory perception in the cerebral cortex, and especially peoples’ spatial perceptions of their own bodies.
1929 – Hans Berger demonstrates the first human electroencephalograph. This is an instrument for measuring and recording the electrical activity of the brain.
1932 – Lord Edgar Adrian and Sir Charles Sherrington win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research on neuron function which details the mechanisms by which nerves transmit messages.
1934 – Egas Moniz (Portuguese neurologist) oversees a series of prefrontal leucotomies as a treatment for depression.
1936 – The first lobotomy was performed in the United States by Walter Freeman and James W. Watts.
1944 – Joseph Erangler and Herbert Spencer Gasser share the Nobel Prize for their discoveries relating to the highly differentiated functions of individual nerve fibres.
1949 – Walter Rudolph Hess wins the Nobel Prize for his research and work on the interbrain. This includes the hypothalamus, subthalamus and parts of the thalamus. His research shows that the interbrain is liable for coordinating the activities of the body’s internal organs.
1961 – Georg Von Bekesy wins the Nobel Prize for his work on the function of the cochlea (a division of the inner ear). His work details the physical mechanism of stimulation within the cochlea, therefore tracing the perception of sound to its fundamental anatomical elements.
1963 – John Carew Eccles, Andrew Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley develop work on the mechanisms of the neuron cell membranes. They discovered the chemical way by which impulses are communicated or repressed by the nervous system.
1970 – Julius Axelrod, Ulf von Euler and Sir Bernard Katz share the Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning the storage, release, and inactivation of catecholamine neurotransmitters and the effect of psychoactive drugs on this process.
1981 – Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel are co-recipients of the Nobel Prize for Physiology which they also share with Roger Sperry. Wiesel and Hubel’s research centres on how visual information is transmitted from the retina to the brain. Sperry’s work concerns the specialization of functions within the cerebral hemispheres of the brain.
1990 – U.S. President George Bush declares the decade starting in 1990 the “Decade and the Brain”.
1991 – Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann share the Nobel Prize for their work on the function of single ion channels which increased understanding of how cells communicate with each other.
1994 – Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Rodbell share the Nobel Prize for their discovery of G-protein coupled receptors and their role in signal transduction.
1997 – Stanley B. Prusiner wins the Nobel Prize for his discovery of a new genre of infectious agents known as prions.
2000 – Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel share the Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system.
