Gazzaniga M.G., Mangun G.R. (eds.) The Cognitive Neurosciences

Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2014. — 1187 p.With some amusement we note that the preface to the last edition of this book carried a hilarious error. One of us (MSG) wrote that preface and buoyantly noted that the first meeting at Lake Tahoe, which underlay that book, had occurred 20 years earlier. After all, it was the fourth edition and the book does come out every five years. Do the math, right? Upon first glance, it seems correct and yet like most everything else in our field, what seems right is not good enough. We have to think about the problems we study again and again. Of course, it seemed right to MSG because the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience had already been up and running for the four years preceding the 1993 Tahoe meeting. It had started off at Harvard, moved to Dartmouth for two years and then to UC Davis. The fifth year of that cycle was the Tahoe meeting, which resulted in the first edition of this volume. Obviously, the volume summarized the previous four years of research presented at the Summer Institutes, not the future SI ’ s. So, in this 2014 edition, the result of the fifth Tahoe meeting, we can say that it really was 20 years ago that we met for the first time in Tahoe! Not only that, the fifth meeting was one of the best. Many of the speakers were former fellows, and many of the current fellows will undoubtedly be future speakers and authors. Indeed, this book and the 2013 Tahoe meeting reflect a transition. As JFK famously said, “The torch has been passed to a new generation. …” In this case, young cognitive neuroscientists are exploring the logic of old ideas and, in some cases, finding them wanting and presenting new ideas. While some old hands were around to steady the transfer, a new era is launched with this book and is bursting with new talent.
The Institute started with a bang, a perspective on some pitfalls in the brain sciences. It was pointed out that while human brains are extremely large, neuroscientists have lacked the necessary methods both to compare humans to other animals and to determine how evolution modified the internal structure of the brain. It was noted that in the absence of such methods, neuroscientists have focused on the study of relatively few model species and have viewed those results as applicable to humans with little qualification. Fortunately, new techniques, especially MRI techniques and the methods of comparative genomics, have started to be used to study humans and other animals and have been game changers. Particularly exciting is the application of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a technique that has been used to compare humans to chimpanzees (the animals most closely related to humans, which makes them critical species for identifying human specializations). These studies have revealed, for the first time, differences in systems of connections between cortical areas and have provided the foundations
for understanding the neural bases of human cognitive and behavioral
specializations.