tomdonoghue / neurohistory

A crowd-sourced 'best-of' collection of old / historical papers in neuroscience (up to ~1970).

NeuroHistory

This is a collections of the 'best' neuroscience papers from history. It is mostly crowd-sourced, from a Twitter thread, with the prompt of: 'what are your favourite old papers, from before ~1970'. Many thanks to everyone who made comments and suggestions.

Hopefully, this collection reflects an interesting collection of historical work in neuroscience, by highlighting a selection of cool papers. Some of these papers are known as classics, where as others are more 'hidden gems'.

The motivation for looking through more old papers came from reading some old papers in my area and being amazed by what they were able to do. I realized that many ideas are way older than I expected. I was quite stunned at the great insights that were made despite relatively sparse data, often underpinning ideas that are still very much current, and wanted to explore neuro-history a bit more generally. If you haven't gone back and read some of the early paper in your area - I highly recommend it.

This will also, hopefully, be a living and updated collection - so feel free to make suggestions for new additions. There isn't really any selection criterion, other than being 'old' (arbitrarily defined as pre ~1970), and also that are reasonable broad in scope, so that they are interesting to a fairly broad audience.

If you have any suggestions for this list, you can get in touch on Twitter @TomDonoghue, and/or by adding a comment as a Github issue on here.

Disclaimers:

• This list is fairly arbitrary, and probably missing many important contributions.
• I have not read all of these papers, so no guarantees on individual entires

Papers

• Cajal (1894) Les Nouvelles Idees sur la Structure du Systeme Nerveux chez L'Homme et chez les Vertebres

  • Originally in French. Translation: New ideas on the structure of the nervous system in man and vertibrates

• Lapicque (1907) Recherches Quantitatives sur L'Excitation Electrique des Nerfs Traitee Comme une Polarisation

  • Originally in French. Translation: Quantitative Research on Electrical Excitation treated like Polarization

• Lunsden (1923) Observations on the Respiratory Centers in the Cat

• Haldane (1926) On Being the Right Size

• Waelder (1936) The Principle of Multiple Function: Observations on Over-Determination

• Young (1938) The Functioning of the Giant Nerve Fibres of the Squid

• Hodgkin & Huxley (1939) Action Potentials Recorded from Inside a Nerve Fibre

• Adrian (1942) Olfactory Reactions in the Brain of the Hedgehog

• McCulloch & Pitts (1943) A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity

• Sperry (1945) The Problem of Central Nervous Reorganization After Nerve Regeneration and Muscle Transposition

• Tolman (1948) Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men

• Magoun (1949) Brain Stem Reticular Formation and Activation of the EEG

• Von Holst & Mittelstaedt (1950) The Principle of Reafference: Interactions Between the Central Nervous System and the Peripheral Organs

• Hodgkin & Huxley (1952) A Quantitative Description of Membrane Current and it's Application to Conduction and Excitation in Nerve

• Fatt & Katz (1951) Spontaneous Subthreshold Activity at Motor Nerve Endings

• Li, McLennan & Jasper (1952) Brain Waves and Unit Discharge in Cerebral Cortex

• Sperry (1952) Neurology and the Mind-Brain Problem

• Estes & Burke (1953) A Theory of Stimulus Variability in Learning

• Del Castillo & Katz (1954) Quantal Components of the End Plate Potential

• Olds & Milner (1954) Positive Reinforcement Produced by Electrical Stimulation of Septal Area and Other Regions of the Rat Brain

• Hartline & Ratliff (1957) Inhibitory Interaction of Receptor Units in the Eye of Limulus

• Hubel & Weisel (1962) Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional Architecture in the Cat's Visual Cortex

• Bishop, Elder & Heath (1963) Intracranial Self-Stimulation in Man

• Rojas & Luxoro (1963) Micro-Injection of Trypsin into Axons of Squid

• Dole & Nyswander (1965) A Medical Treatment for Diacetylmorphine (Heroin) Addiction: A Clinical Trial with Methadone Hydrochloride

• Guilford & Hopefner (1966) Sixteen Divergent-Production Abilities at the Ninth-Grade Level

• Lettvin, Maturan, McCulloch & Pitts (1968) What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain

neurohistory's Issues

The first IF models and a correction

Perhaps you could include Louis Lapicque's first introduction of an IF like model (1907) (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs00422-007-0190-0.pdf) - you would understand the original in French as well I guess.

Also, Haldane is spelt wrong in Haldana, On Being the Right Size.