Neural Integration at the Mesoscopic Level: the Advent of some Ideas in the Last Half Century

Abstract

History seen by a professional historian, based only on the documented record, always incomplete and liable to bias, can be unreliable. Modern history seen by a protagonist must surely be among the most unreliable. My only excuse for this effort is that I was invited by the relevant Society committee. My reason for accepting is that I feel even the fragmentary part of neuroscience I can speak about is a human drama, romantic and exciting, and a flood on which we are floating, unable to dump the baggage of past biases. Our points of view, priorities, and positions on all the controversial issues and even the well established, noncontroversial ones, are not as rational as we would like to think but are strongly conditioned by where we came from. I will depend mainly on selected vignettes of the way things looked when I was a student, a young postdoctoral fellow and an Assistant Professor, to compare with the way they look to me or to others now, in each of half a dozen mesoscopic domains. I mean by mesoscopic domains the middle levels - those in between the most basic subcellular or molecular and the higher levels of learning and cognition. The half dozen domains constitute of course, anything but a representative fraction of neuroscience. I believe, however, that they add up to a nontrivial segment of the big picture with respect to the integrative aspects of our science. Most of the fronts that grew into today's popular branches of our science are not represented but a small set of particular interest and probability of further surprises.