Book Symposium: William Uttal’s The New Phrenology Précis of The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain∗

It has long been my concern that, in our efforts to exorcise speculative and philo-sophical considerations from what we all want to be an objective empirical science, cognitive neuroscientists have overlooked an important methodological tool – crit-ical analysis of the foundation concepts, axioms, assumptions and premises that underlie our day-to-day research efforts. The present book, in an effort to correct this oversight, takes aim at a foundation issue in modern cognitive neuroscience – Are cognitive processes associated with particular brain regions? This is the basic question of localization. There is a long history of active research by neuroscientists of all stripes seeking answers to this question. In my earlier (1981) book, I dealt extensively with the problem from the point of view of the techniques that were available at that time – mainly direct electrical recording and stimulation and extirpative surgery – as well as with the empirical findings that had accumulated up to that time concerning the localization of cognitive processes in the brain. In recent years, an entirely new dimension has been added to the study of wher