Wired Together: The Montreal Neurological Institute and the Origins of Neuroscience

Examines the role of an influential neurological institute in shaping a new, interdisciplinary science--neuroscience--and advancing it worldwide.

Wired Together explains the rise of neuroscience by tracing the history of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and the men and women who transformed it into neuroscience’s most innovative and productive research site. Opened by neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in 1934, the MNI pioneered the surgical treatment of epilepsy and transformed the operating theater into a new kind of scientific laboratory for investigating the functions of the brain. But more than that, the MNI became a crucial site for forming new interdisciplinary practices. These involved, as Yvan Prkachin puts it, wiring together new assemblies of physicians, surgeons, and scientists into a growing network that made possible the emergence of an interdisciplinary science of the brain.

Wired Together also traces how the MNI and its network of scientists spread this new interdisciplinary neuroscience to the rest of the world. Prkachin uncovers the surprising history of some of the most important neuroscientific organizations, discoveries, theories, and instruments from their beginnings in Montreal through the complex international networks of the post-war sciences. In doing so, he tells the stories of the most crucial and least understood characters from early neuroscience--such as Brenda Milner, Donald Hebb, Herbert Jasper, Molly Harrower, and David Hubel--as well as the surprising origins of scientific practices and ideas like sensory deprivation, multiple forms of memory, and artificial neural networks.

Yvan Prkachin is a senior research associate at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich.