Neuropsychology

The attempt to understand mental functions by correlating them with the activities of particular parts of the brain. The science might be said to have really begun with Paul Broca's classic paper showing how a particular form of aphasia was caused by damage to a particular region of the brain. For many years such lesion studies formed almost the sole probe available to neuropsychologists, and the ingenuity in some lesion studies is truly astounding. I recall having read someplace, but cannot now find the citation, that one of the things which made the early studies possible was the replacement, first in the American Civil War and then in the Franco-Prussian War, of muskets by rifled bullets, which left much smaller wounds --- the result being that, if a soldier survived a head wound, he was much more likely to have a specific disorder, rather than just being generally "cracked in his intellectuals" (as Patrick O'Brian's characters would say). Be that as it may, for many years the best and most active neuropsychologists in the world were to be found in the Soviet Union, for two reasons:

They had official support for being materialist and analytical, at a time when Western neuroscience was often sunk in holistic or behaviorist darkness, and leading neuropsychologists reciprocated by dressing their findings up in appropriate dialectical language (easily divided through for);
The Soviets had more walking wounded from the Great Patriotic War than any other country.

The result was that the Soviet scholars had an unrivalled opportunity to correlate damage to the brain and psychological incapacities, which they seized, with results which are fascinating in themselves, and even of some use in helping those with brain damage recover some of their lost functions. (Eventually, of course, the rest of the world began to catch up, and probably the lead in neuropsychology, as with most other sciences, is now held by America, where it tends to be called things like "cognitive neuroscience." Reductionism and the study of mental function both became respectable in this country after World War II --- what with molecular biology on the one hand, and computers and cognitive science on the other --- and there were great heaping scads of money for biomedical research.)

Today, of course, we no longer have a large supply of Red Army veterans with head-wounds, and in fact lesion studies are much less necessary, because we can now look at the anatomy and even the activity of living, thinking brains. (The key invention here is nuclear magnetic resonance, a fairly arcane bit of physics which had no particular use for several decades after it was discovered, and would've been an excellent candidate for Proxmiring. Need I draw the moral?) This is exceedingly neat, and, gratifyingly, the results confirm those of lesion studies exactly. (That is, when the lesionnaires had figured out that knocking out one region of the brain keeps you from doing something, lo and behold that region is used in that activity.)

The picture which emerges from all this is of a brain composed of immense numbers of highly specialized sub-units, connected together in various ways to perform the complex tasks we take for granted, in ways that have little to do with our introspective impressions or common-sense notions or (most) philosophical theories. Things which seem elementary and indivisible turn out to be the products of complicated arrangements of many different, widely separated, specialized bits of the brain, acting in concert but without any discernable central control. ("The closer you look at the brain, the less it seems like there's anybody home," is the way one of my neuroscience professors once put it.) This raises all sorts of fascinating questions, half-scientific and half-philosophical (like, How did all those little bits of grey matter get specialized?, and What happens when we learn to do something complicated?): but another time.

William H. Calvin and George A. Ojemann, Conversations with Neil's Brain
Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error
Clark Glymour, The Mind's Arrows: Bayes Nets and Graphical Causal Models in Psychology [Several interesting chapters on neuropsychological methods, and the logical limits of inferring cognitive architecture from various sorts of lesion data. Mini-review]
Anne Harrington
- Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought
- Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture
A. R. Luria [Greatest of the Russian lesionnaires]
- The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology [Textbook, dated but still worthwhile. I can't say how the original read in Russian, of course, but the English is somewhat jargony, and suffers from the "In this section we will show that; in this section we are showing this; in this section we have shown that" syndrome. I suspect the extravagance of the praise it carries on the cover from Sacks, Bruner et alii owes more to Luria's eminence as a researcher than the quality of the text itself. Further, I am not sure how to evaluate Luria's repeated statements that cognition is, "in essence" and "in origin" a "social process." For instance, in the interesting chapter on attention, he claims it is "social," because infants learn what to attend to from their parents. This in particular seems faulty, because without an innate disposition to attend to their parents (among other things!), how could this process even start? In any case, what I want to know is how much of this was simply ideological cover, for which we can just "divide through," and how much is a genuine theory to be seriously considered. — That paragraph was written in the mid-1990s. I can now confirm that Luria was very serious about the social origin of cognition, a thesis he obtained from his mentor L. S. Vygotsky. I have grown more sympathetic to it myself, though I still think they went much too far with it (as the example of infant attention shows). I have also grown more tolerant of textbookish prose, having produced far too much of it myself. (20 Dec. 2009)]
- Man with a Shattered World ["autoneurography" of a Soviet soldier who suffered severe brain damage during the Great Patriotic War, with commentary and medical explanations by Luria]
- David Joravsky, "A Great Soviet Psychologist" [Review of Luria's works available in English, as of May 1974]
- The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology [Autobiography, which maintains a prudent silence on politics]
Neuropsychology Central
V. Ramachandran et al. had a great paper in Nature a few years back, "Touching the Phantom Limb," on the mehcanism of phantom limb effects; my copy is buried somehwere in my office back in Madison. His review article on phantom limbs is forthcoming in next year's Annual Review of Neuroscience.
Oliver Sacks [More the clincal than the investigative side, but exceedingly well-told]
- Migraine
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
- A Leg to Stand On
George Wolford, Michael B. Miller, and Michael Gazzaniga, "The Left Hemisphere's Role in Hypothesis Formation", The Journal of Neuroscience 20 (2000): RC64

Michael L. Anderson, "Massive redeployment, exaptation, and the functional integration of cognitive operations", Synthese 159 (2007): 329--345
William Bechtel, Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience
Max Coltheart [discussion by D. Lende
- "Brain Imaging, Connectionism, and Cognitive Neuropsychology", Cognitive Neuropsychology 21 (2004): 21--25
- Cognitive Neuropsychology, Scholarpedia 3:2 (2008): 3644
- "What has functional neuroimaging told us about the mind (so far)?", Cortex 42 (2006): 323--31 [with commentaries by various pp. 387--421, and reply, pp. 422--427]
Cytowic, The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology [blurb]
Damasio and Damasio, Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychology
Mark D'Esposito (ed.), Neurological Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience
Gavriela Eilam, "The Philosophical Foundations of Aleksandr R. Luria's Neuropsychology", Science in Context 16 (2004): 551--577
Martha J. Farah
- "Neuropsychological inference with an interactive brain: A critique of the locality assumption" [preprint]
- Visual Agnosia: Disorders of Object Recognition and What They Tell Us About Normal Vision [Blurb]
Martha J. Farah and Todd E. Feinberg (eds.), Patient-Based Approaches to Cognitive Neuroscience [Blurb]
Joaquin Fuster, Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition
Vinod Goel and Raymond J. Dolan, "Differential involvement of left prefrontal cortex in inductive and deductive reasoning", Cognition 93 (2004): B109--B121
Goldberg, The Executive Mind
John C. L. Ingram, Neurolinguistics: An Introduction to Spoken Language Processing and its Disorders [Blurb]
Alon Keinan, Ben Sandbank, Claus C. Hilgetag, Isaac Meilijson and Eytan Ruppin, "Fair Attribution of Functional Contribution in Artificial and Biological Networks", Neural Computation 16 (2004): 1887--1915
Richard D. Lane and Lynn Nadel (eds.), Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion
Luria
- Mind of a Mnemonist ("neurography" of a circus performer)
- Contemporary Neuropsychology and the Legacy of Luria (ed. Elkhonon Goldberg)
Victoria McGeer, "Why neuroscience matters to cognitive neuropsychology", Synthese 159 (2007): 347--371
Jenni Ogden, Fractured Minds: A Case-Study Approach to Clinical Neuropsychology
Randolph W. Parks, Daniel S. Levine and Debra L. Long (eds.), Fundamentals of Neural Network Modeling: Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
V. S. Ramachandran
- A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
- Phantoms in the Brain
N. D. Schiff, J. T. Giacino, K. Kalmar, J. D. Victor, K. Baker, M. Gerber, B. Fritz, B. Eisenberg, J. O'Connor, E. J. Kobylarz, S. Farris, A. Machado, C. McCagg, F. Plum, J. J. Fins and A. R. Rezai, "Behavioural improvements with thalamic stimulation after severe traumatic brain injury", Nature 448 (2007): 600--603
Tim Shallice, From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure [Blurb]
William R. Uttal, The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain [But see Hubbard's critical comments (PDF)]

Notebooks

Neuropsychology