Fire in the Quill 英文参考文献.docVIP

BookReview/ScienceintheMedia FireintheQuill ArminSchneider* DepartmentofMolecularNeurology,SygnisBioscience,Heidelberg,Germany Theinterestthatthediscipline‘‘history of neuroscience’’ receives today among studentsandteachersoftheneurosciences can be witnessed during the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, where therowsreservedforpostersonthetopic arefullydeserted,andserveasspacefora quiet lunch rather than an information anddiscussionforum.Thisdisinterestisof coursepartiallyforcedbytheneedtosuck in as much technical detail knowledge as possibleinone’sfieldofinterest,whichin thelast50yearshasbecomenarrowerand narrower. But,itmayalsostemfromanunderes- timation of the importance the non- technical dimensions of the neurosciences have reached today. Theoretical philoso- phy has increasingly ceased to produce new influences for our thinking, and the sciences—foremost astronomy, physics, and neuroscience—have become a main force that shapes the way we think about ourselvesandtheworld.However,asthey venture deeper and deeper into the complex details of their field, scientists are increasingly at a loss to explain the broader implications of what they do to thepublic. A prerequisite for the ability to trans- pose new findings from the level of pure technicalunderstandingtoanunderstand- ing of its metaphysical and sociological dimensions is to understand how discov- eries of the past have shaped the way we perceivetheworldtoday. Gross,CG(2009)Aholeinthehead:moretalesinthehistoryofneuroscience.Boston, MA:MITPress.366p.ISBN(cloth):978-0-262-01388-3US$35.00. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000323.g001 Thus,abookthathelpsustotakeafew stepsbackandviewneurosciencethrough a wide-angle lens instead of the micro- scopeobjective,whiledoingsointhemost entertainingway,isverywelcomeindeed. CharlesG.Gross,ProfessorofPsychol- ogy at Princeton University, has contrib- utedseminalworktoourunderstandingof thefunctioningofthevisualcortexandof computation of sensory information in general,