Researched
Neuron doctrine
The nervous system consists of separate nerve cells that communicate across tiny gaps.
Open in the interactive tree →Camillo Golgi's silver stain (1873) made single nerve cells visible, and Santiago Ramon y Cajal used it from 1888 to show that the brain is made of discrete neurons rather than a continuous net; they shared the 1906 Nobel Prize. Cajal also drew the direction of signal flow and predicted the synapse. All of modern neuroscience, from circuits to drugs, assumes this picture.
Prerequisites
- Microscope1665
- Cell theory1838
- Golgi's silver stain1873Cajal's drawings of single neurons used Golgi's silver stain
Unlocks
- Alzheimer's disease described1906
- Chemical nerve signalling1921
- McCulloch-Pitts neuron1943
- Hebbian learning1949
- How nerve cells fire1952
- Psychiatric drugs1952
- Perceptron & Artificial Neurons1958Rosenblatt's artificial neuron is modelled on nerve cells as separate units
- Worm connectome1986
- Brain wiring maps2024
- Alzheimer's and brain declineopen
- How memories are storedopen