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Neuroscience has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past 20 years, including a substantial increase in the number of neuroscience departments, programs, and courses at the undergraduate level. To meet the need of new neuroscience courses, there has also been growth in the number of introductory neuroscience textbooks designed for undergraduates. However, textbooks typically trail current knowledge by five to ten years, especially in neuroscience where our understanding is increasing rapidly. Consequently, it is often important to supplement neuroscience and physiology textbooks with information about recent findings in neuroscience. To design supplementary educational material, it is essential first to identify the educational objectives of the program and the characteristics of the learners, which can differ dramatically between undergraduate and graduate or professional students. Four principles that may serve the selection and design of supplementary material for undergraduate neuroscience and physiology courses are that (1) material must be interesting to the undergraduates, (2) material should reinforce previously learned concepts, (3) students must be adequately prepared, and (4) the teacher and student must have sufficient appropriate resources.
Jaak Panksepp's article 'Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals and Humans' is a excellent review and summary by a leading empirical contributor whose work for many years has been running counter to reigning behavioristic premises in neuroscience. It may unfortunately be true that he could not get this review published in many neuroscience journals because it attacks too many sacred (behavioristic) cows. Panksepp has given readers of Consciousness and Cognition a nicely condensed summary of much of his classic 1998 textbook, Affective Neuroscience. I'm reasonably confident that future neuroscience students will look on that textbook as one of the seminal publications on the subject of emotion and the brain, much as we might now look back on Luria's Higher Cortical Functions in Man, or Paul MacLean's classic work, The Triune Brain. There is probably little that I can add to his elegant presentation of the basic affective neuroscience findings, but I would like to highlight a few key issues for the reader.
We have developed a program NeuroText to populate the neuroscience databases in SenseLab (http://senselab.med.yale.edu/senselab) by mining the natural language text of neuroscience articles. NeuroText uses a two-step approach to identify relevant articles. The first step (pre-processing), aimed at 100% sensitivity, identifies abstracts containing database keywords. In the second step, potentially relevant abstracts identified in the first step are processed for specificity dictated by database architecture, and neuroscience, lexical and semantic contexts. NeuroText results were presented to the experts for validation using a dynamically generated interface that also allows expert-validated articles to be automatically deposited into the databases. Of the test set of 912 articles, 735 were rejected at the pre-processing step. For the remaining articles, the accuracy of predicting database-relevant articles was 85%. Twenty-two articles were erroneously identified. NeuroText deferred decisions on 29 articles to the expert. A comparison of NeuroText results versus the experts' analyses revealed that the program failed to correctly identify articles' relevance due to concepts that did not yet exist in the knowledgebase or due to vaguely presented information in the abstracts. NeuroText uses two "evolution" techniques (supervised and unsupervised) that play an important role in the continual improvement of the retrieval results. Software that uses the NeuroText approach can facilitate the creation of curated, special-interest, bibliography databases.
Bennett and Hacker use conceptual analysis to appraise the theoretical language of modern cognitive neuroscientists, and conclude that neuroscientific theory is largely dualistic despite the fact that neuroscientists equate mind with the operations of the brain. The central error of cognitive neuroscientists is to commit the mereological fallacy, the tendency to ascribe to the brain psychological concepts that only make sense when ascribed to whole animals. The authors review how the mereological fallacy is committed in theories of memory, perception, thinking, imagery, belief, consciousness, and other psychological processes studied by neuroscientists, and the consequences that fallacious reasoning have for our understanding of how the brain participates in cognition and behavior. Several behavior-analytic concepts may themselves be nonsense based on thorough conceptual analyses in which the criteria for sense and nonsense are found in the ways the concepts are used in ordinary language. Nevertheless, the authors' nondualistic approach and their consistent focus on behavioral criteria for the application of psychological concepts make Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience an important contribution to cognitive neuroscience.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the first to establish an Institute devoted exclusively to psychological research in Germany, started his career as a (neuro)physiologist. He gradually turned into a psychologist in the 1860's and 1870's, at a time when neuroscience had to deal with the problem of giving an adequate physiological interpretation of the data accumulated by neuroanatomy. Neither the functional interpretation of brain morphology, nor the options provided by the reflex model seemed acceptable to Wundt. In his Physiological Psychology, first published in 1874, Wundt adds another aspect to this discussion by showing that psychology may help, and indeed is required, to clarify some of the most controversial problems in brain research. He thus became a key figure in neuroscience's struggle to locate itself within the various research traditions. The following theses will be argued for: 1. Wundt's turn to psychology resulted from his view that the methodological basis of physiological brain research of the time was unsatisfactory. 2. Psychology, in its attempt to solve these problems, implied a new conception of an interaction between experimental and theoretical brain research. 3. Wundt tried to demonstrate the necessity of psychological considerations for experimental brain research. These points are discussed with reference to Wundt's treatment of the localization of functions in the brain. According to Wundt, psychology can show, by analyzing the complex structure of intellect and will, that mental phenomena can be realized in the brain only in the form of complex interations of the elements of the brain. The results of the psychological considerations imply that a strict localizations cannot be correct; but they are also turned against the conception of a complete functional equivalence of the various parts of the cortext. For Wundt, a reconstruction of brain processes cannot start with neurones, but only with patterns of a functional organization of brain activity. Wundt accordingly proposes a functional interpretation on the level of the physiology of nervous tissue as well as for the over-all organization of the brain.
The number of neuroscientists in Europe is large enough to match that of the neuroscientific community in North America. However, the degree of cohesiveness in the former is hampered by, among other things, the lack of a common language, the existence of geopolitical boundaries, and the dearth of pan-European funding initiatives. In this article, Wolf Singer, President of the European Neuroscience Association (ENA), discusses these issues and describes how the ENA is changing its organization, in particular the way in which its annual meeting is to be organized, in an effort to counteract the current deficiencies in European neuroscience.
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