Brain Vol. 128 No. 1 © Guarantors of Brain 2005; all rights reserved
Editorial
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Last year, William Feindel and Valerie Grosvenor Myer reviewed medical and social attitudes to the physical basis and nature of the soul; and Ray Tallis tackled the thorny issue of consciousness. But if these arguments were eventually settled in favour of an anatomical locus of mind, how then does the brain work? Leonardo da Vinci first moved neurological attention from functions dependent on the contents of the ventricles to the brain substance itself. But in 1543, Andreas Vesalius doubted whether anatomy would ever explain function and, as late as 1633, Kenelme Digby was still advancing Platonic ideas on the function of the nervous system. In ‘Impulses, good and