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Neuroscience Timeline

A Timeline of Neuroscience Research

Year (A.D.)

Event


	2nd Century	Galen of Pergamum identifies the brain as the organ of the mind.
	17th Century	The brain becomes accepted as the substrate of mental life rather than its ventricles, as early writers had proposed.
	1664	Thomas Willis publishes Cerebri anatome, with illustrations of the brain by Christopher Wren. It is the most comprehensive treatise on brain anatomy and function published up to that time.
	1791	Luigi Galvani reveals the electric nature of nervous action by stimulating nerves and muscles of frog legs.
	1808	Franz Joseph Gall proposes that specific brain regions control specific functions.
	1852	Hermann von Helmholtz measures the speed of a nerve impulse in the frog.
	1879	Wilhelm Wundt establishes the first laboratory of experimental psychology in Leipzig, Germany.
	1891	Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz introduces the term neuron.
	1897	Charles Sherrington introduces the term "synapse".
	1898-1903	Edward Thorndike and Ivan Pavlov describe operant and classical conditioning, two fundamental types of learning.
	1906	Santiago Ramón y Cajal summarizes compelling evidence for the neuron doctrine, that the nervous system is composed of discrete cells.
	1906	Alois Alzheimer describes the pathology of the neurodegenerative disease that comes to bear his name.
	1914	Henry Dale demonstrates the physiological action of acetylcholine, which is later identified as a neurotransmitter.
	1929	In a famous program of lesion experiments in rats, Karl Lashley attempts to localize memory in the brain.
	1929	Hans Berger uses human scalp electrodes to demonstrate electroencephalography.
	1928-1932	Edgar Adrian describes method for recording from single sensory and motor axons; H. Keffer Hartline applies this method to the recording of single-cell activity in the eye of the horseshoe crab.
	1940s	Alan Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley, and Bernard Katz explain electrical activity of neurons by concentration gradients of ions and movement of ions through pores.
	1946	Kenneth Cole develops the voltage-clamp technique to measure current flow across the cell membrane.
	1949	Donald Hebb introduces a synaptic learning rule, which becomes known as the Hebb rule.
	1930s-1950s	The chemical nature of synaptic transmission is established by Otto Loewi, Henry Dale, Wilhelm Feldberg, Stephen Kuffler, and Bernard Katz at peripheral synapses and is extended to the spinal cord by John Eccles and others.
	1930s-1950s	Wilder Penfield and Theodore Rasmussen map the motor and sensory homunculus and illustrate localization of function in the human brain.
	1950s	Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Nikolaas Tinbergen establish the science of ethology (animal behavior in natural contexts) and lay the foundation for neuroethology.
	1955-1960	Vernon Mountcastle, David Hubel, and Torsten Wiesel pioneer single-cell recording from mammalian sensory cortex; Nils-Ake Hillarp introduces fluorescent microscopic methods to study cellular distribution of biogenic amines.
	1956	Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen isolate and purify nerve growth factor.
	1957	Brenda Milner describes patient H.M. and discovers the importance of the medial temporal lobe for memory.
	1958	Arvid Carlsson finds dopamine to be a transmitter in the brain and proposes that it has a role in extrapyramidal disorders such as Parkinson's disease.
	1958	Simple invertebrate systems, including Aplysia, Drosophila, and C. elegans, are introduced to analyze elementary aspects of behavior and learning at the cellular and molecular level.
	1962-1963	Brain anatomy in rodents is found to be altered by experience; first evidence for role of protein synthesis in memory formation.
	1963	Roger Sperry proposes a precise system of chemical matching between pre- and postsynaptic neuronal partners (the chemoaffinity hypothesis).
	1966-1969	Ed Evarts and Robert Wurtz develop methods for studying movement and perception with single-cell recordings from awake, behaving monkeys.
	1970	Synaptic changes are related to learning and memory storage in Aplysia
	Mid-1970s	Paul Greengard shows that many neurotransmitters work by means of protein phosphorylation.
	1973	Timothy Bliss and Terje Lomo discover long-term potentiation, a candidate synaptic mechanism for long-term mammalian memory.
	1976	Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann develop the patch-clamp technique for recording the activity of single ion channels.
	Late 1970s	Neuroimaging by positron emission tomography is developed.
	1980s	Experimental evidence becomes available for the divisibility of memory into multiple systems; an animal model of human amnesia is developed.
	1986	H. Robert Horvitz discovers the ced genes, which are critical for programmed cell death.
	1986	Patient R.B. establishes the importance of the hippocampus for human memory.
	1990	Segi Ogawa and colleagues develop functional magnetic resonance imaging.
	1990	Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smythies develop gene knockout technology, which is soon applied to neuroscience.
	1991	Linda Buck and Richard Axel discover that the olfactory receptor family consists of over 1000 different genes. The anatomical components of the medial temporal lobe memory system are identified.
	1993	The Huntington's Disease Collaborative Research Group identifies the gene responsible for Huntington's disease.
	1990s	Neural development is transformed from a descriptive to a molecular discipline by Gerald Fischbach, Jack McMahan, Tom Jessell, and Corey Goodman; neuroimaging is applied to problems of human cognition, including perception, attention, and memory.
	1990s	Reinhard Jahn, James Rothman, Richard Scheller, and Thomas Sudhof delineate molecules critical for exocytosis.
	1998	First 3D structure of an ion channel is revealed by Rod MacKinnon.