Outcomes in Neuroscience Education: Modular Theory and Network Theory

Few can contest the complicated and interdisci-plinary origins of neuroscientific study, as its precise date of birth is obscure. However, it is important to place the first true and deliberate neuroscience studies in proper histori-cal context so we can fully appreciate and understand why topics were studied through the lens of modular theory. Ancient Egyptians considered the brain and its organic projections to be little more than waste, instead believing that the true “seat of the soul” was the heart (Chudler, n.d.). This view was replicated in early Greek and biblical texts but represented the consolidation of personality and human character into physiological terms. Later, Hippocrates and his followers rebuked this dogma in early physiology, instead arguing that the brain was the major control center for the body and possessed three ventricles, each of which was responsible for a different mental faculty: imagination, reason, and memory (Chudler, n.d.). This view was support-ed by the Greek physician Galen who wrote extensively on the subject and had a profound influence on Enlightenment philosophers such as Rene Descartes (Chudler, n.d.). Hippocrates, Galen, and Descartes’ collective writ-ings emphasized an increas-ingly compartmentalized view of brain structure and function, a sentiment that came to a head in the early 19th century under the directorship of the German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall, the founder of the study of phrenology (Fodor, 1983). Phrenology borrowed major tenets of previous neurophysiological literature such as continu-ing to support the notion that the brain was the principal organ of the mind. Gall took those previous ideas to new maxims, claiming that the brain represented a collection of precisely localized cerebral organs with specific functions. The strength and proficiency of those particular functions, he argued, were proportional to the relative sizes and geometries of their respective skull regions.Ope