As we prepare to say goodbye to 2020, I decided to look back at what had been happening in brain science 100 years ago.
Neuroscience was very different back in 1920 — in fact, the word 'neuroscience' didn't exist yet, and wouldn't be coined for over 40 years. However, I found a remarkable 1920 editorial showing that some of the fundamental questions in neuroscience today were anticipated a century ago.
This editorial was published in the Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, which exists today under another name.
First off, the author of the editorial adopts a striking military analogy to describe the troubled relationship between psychology and "physiology" (what we today would call neuroscience):
The lack of co-ordination is particularly evident in the combined attack upon the problem of behaviour which is being made by psychology (as it were, from the air) and physiology (as it were, from the trenches). ...
