Mitchell Glickstein

Mitchell Glickstein

Mitchell Glickstein will serve as the Center's first Visiting Distinguished Fellow, starting October 2006.

Professor Glickstein is Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at University College London and is also a Summer Teacher and Research Professor at Dartmouth College. He has previously held appointments at the University of Washington, Brown University, the University of Parma, and the University of Bologna.

In addition to his numerous foundational contributions to our understanding of the anatomy of the brain, and in particular the anatomy of the visual pathways and cerebellum, Professor Glickstein is also a regarded scholar of the history of neuroscience.

Professor Glickstein will bring to the Center a refreshing combination of far-reaching vision and rigorous science. It is for this reason that he is distinctly suited to serve as the Center's first Visiting Distinguished Fellow.

Tentative List of Lectures

Each lecture will be a historically based approach to understanding a current problem in brain and behavior. The emphasis will be not on what we know, but how we know.

Lecture 1

Frontal Lobes and Frontal Lobotomy. How did surgical intervention for mental disorders get started? From happier chimpanzees to Portuguese psychiatric patients.

Lecture 2

Localization in the brain. The discoveries, first of structural, then of functional differences among different areas of the cerebral cortex.

Lecture 3

What are brain and spinal cord made of? From the cell theory to the neuron doctrine. You and I and tomatoes are made from the same basic building blocks. How did this principle get applied to the brain?

Lecture 4

Sparks and soup. How do nerve cells communicate with one another?

Lecture 5

The social nature of science. How do scientists get on with the state? How do they get on with one another?  Competition and antagonisms among scientists. 

Lecture 6

Did you learn to tell up from down or were you born that way? The problem of visual direction.

Lecture 7

We all know that there are ten to the tenth neurons in the human brain. Ten to the eleventh of these are contained in the granular layer of the cerebellum. What does the cerebellum do?

Lecture 8

The discovery of the visual cortex. From an obscure Italian medical student’s anatomical observations to the war time clinical studies of a Japanese, and then a British physician.