Principles of Neural Science

4921 Pages·2012·225.69 MB·English

by  Eric R. Kandel

Columns II (left) and IV (right) of the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus

This papyrus, transcribed in the Seventeenth Century B.C., is a medical treatise
that contains the earliest reference to the brain anywhere in human records.
According to James Breasted, who translated and published the document in
1930, the word brain occurs only 8 times in ancient Egyptian, 6 of them on these
pages. The papyrus describes here the symptoms, diagnosis, and prognosis of
two patients with compound fractures of the skull, and compares the surface of
the brain to “those ripples that happen in copper through smelting, with a thing
in it that throbs and flutters under your fingers like the weak spot of the crown of
a boy before it becomes whole for him.” The red ink highlights the patients’
ailments and their prognoses. (Reproduced, with permission, from the New York
Academy of Medicine Library.)
Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our
pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears.
Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the
beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant…. It is the
same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear,
whether by night or by day, brings sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless
anxieties, absent-mindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit. These things
that we suffer all come from the brain, when it is not healthy, but becomes
abnormally hot, cold, moist, or dry, or suffers any other unnatural affection to
which it was not accustomed. Madness comes from its moistness. When the
brain is abnormally moist, of necessity it moves, and when it moves neither sight
nor hearing are still, but we see or hear now one thing and now another, and the
tongue speaks in accordance with the things seen and heard on any occasion. But
when the brain is still, a man can think properly.
attributed to Hippocrates
Fifth Century, B.C.

Reproduced, with permission, from The Sacred Disease, in Hippocrates, Vol. 2,
page 175, translated by W.H.S. Jones, London and New York: William
Heinemann and Harvard University Press. 1923.

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Cover image: This image is a lithograph by F. Schima from a drawing by
Sigmund Freud of the spinal ganglion of the lamprey Petromyzon. Before he
discovered the unconscious, Freud had a promising career as a neural scientist.
The cover thus recognizes that, a century after Freud’s discovery, progress in the
study of cognition has reemphasized the importance of unconscious mental
processes for perception and action. (Reproduced, with permission, from
Sigmund Freud, “Über Spinalganglien und RÜckenmark der Petromyzon,”
Sitzungsberichte der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Classe der
Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, LXXVIII. Band I. Abtheilung,
1878, copyright New York Academy of Medicine.)
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James H. Schwartz
1933 –2006

WE WISH TO DEDICATE THIS FIFTH EDITION of Principles of Neural Science to our
friend and colleague, James H. Schwartz, one of the founding editors who died
on March 13, 2006. Jimmy was an outstanding neuroscientist and scholar. His
talent for science and his extraordinary erudition were evident from his days as a
medical student at New York University. While at NYU he worked with Werner
Maas in the microbiology department and carried out an important set of studies
on feedback inhibition in bacterial metabolism. This work was so impressive that
upon completing medical school, Jimmy was nominated for the highly selective
graduate program in biology that had just been established at The Rockefeller
University by Detlev Bronk. By the time Jimmy obtained his Ph.D. in Fritz
Lippman’s laboratory and graduated from Rockefeller in 1964, he had
established himself as an outstanding biochemist. He was therefore eagerly
recruited back to NYU in 1965 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Microbiology.
There Jimmy turned to studying the nerve cells of the snail Aplysia, which
were so large and uniquely identifiable that they seemed likely candidates for a
study of neuronal biochemical identity. The immediate success of his initial
studies encouraged him to devote himself completely to the nervous system. He
rapidly became one of the leading biochemists on the nervous system and one of
the leading thinkers regarding the relationship of brain to behavior.
The idea of going from molecules to behavior was the organizing theme of the
first edition of Principles of Neural Science, which Jimmy co-edited. He simply
loved working on Principles. A superb writer, he demanded precision in