American Neuroscience in the Twentieth Century: Confluence of the Neural, Behavioral, and Communicative Streams (review)

Horace Winchell Magoun (1907–91) was a leading early researcher in the field now known as neuroscience, and one of the founders of the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. His pioneering work on the physiological mechanisms underlying wakefulness, consciousness, and attention was, for a time, the gold standard for teaching and research in functional neurophysiology. According to Louise Marshall's preface, Magoun began his book in the mid-1970s but could not find a publisher. He continued to work on the manuscript through the 1980s, when support for his work was terminated. After his death, Marshall, his close colleague and friend, undertook to edit his notes and complete the remaining chapters.

American Neuroscience begins with a discussion of the influence of phrenology on research and the teaching of anatomy and physiology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For me, this was the book's most interesting chapter. Although eventually discredited, phrenology provided the conceptual underpinnings for the cortical localization of function, still the primary conceptual focus of much neurological research.

The first seven chapters survey the development of American comparative anatomy and physiology, while the remaining eight discuss experimental, comparative, and physiological psychology. Perhaps the most important contribution of the book is its survey of the relationship between the behavioral and neural sciences. Despite heavy emphasis on the dogma of cerebral localization of functions, mid-twentieth-century neuroscience had a strong behavioral focus. In contrast, contemporary neuroscience is much more reductionistic, molecular, and technique-driven, and most students are never taught that there are more holistic, functional consequences of cellular activity. In the few conceptual and theoretical reviews that do appear, many of the ideas have their roots in early and mid-twentieth-century experimental, comparative, and physiological psychology.¹ It is rare now to see citations of earlier work going back more than a decade, so Magoun's book fills a gap by providing glimpses of early contributors to the field, and their ideas about brain/behavior mechanisms up until the late 1960s. Unfortunately, after the 1960s the book falls silent—just when American neuroscience really began to take off and establish itself as a new discipline independent of its earlier behavioral and physiological base. A more accurate title for this volume would have been "American Neuroscience: The First Fifty Years."

I am a bench scientist, not a historian, and for me, American Neuroscience is a tough read. This is not like a collection of essays by a distinguished scientist offering personal perspectives on the development of a field, or a life-and-times biography. It reads more like a collection of jottings from over the course of Magoun's professional lifetime. The style is pedantic, and the chapters lack flow and consistency. Thus, discussing "Early North American Science," Magoun notes: "Surprisingly, an unrecognized contribution from China merits attention" (p. xv)—but he never says what that contribution is. There are many such discontinuities. Sometimes the significance of researchers' work is obscured by excessive detail about where they grew up, went to school, and other incidentals. Dr. Marshall's attempt to complete the manuscript did not work: the book purports to be not a collection of biographical sketches or a personal memoir, but a survey of the history of the field—but too much assimilation and synthesis of ideas remained to be done for any colleague, however familiar with the writer's world, to supply the lack. American Neuroscience is not likely to be found useful as a teaching tool, but it may be enjoyable to emeriti in the field who like to reminisce about whom they knew, what they did, and where they did it.