Wired Together

“The excellent Wired Together shows that the Montreal Neurological Institute was at the heart of the development of neuroscience. Prkachin explores the MNI’s fascinating and ambiguous global legacies, ranging from novel experimental tools to CIA-funded attempts at brainwashing. The combination of deft analysis, theoretical sophistication, and fascinating stories makes the book a must-read not only for those interested in the history of neuroscience, but for those who care about scientific institutions, interdisciplinarity, and Cold War-era scientific ties.” – Melinda Baldwin, author of “Making ‘Nature’: The History of a Scientific Journal”“Wired Together represents a magnificent accomplishment. In writing what will surely stand as the definitive history of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), Prkachin has also rewritten the history of the origins of neuroscience. In contrast to accounts that stress the importance of developments at MIT in this history, the author offers a new origin story that highlights developments at McGill University’s MNI. A remarkable group of figures—neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, neurophysiologist Herbert Jasper, and psychologists Molly Harrower, Brenda Milner, Donald Hebb, and David Hubel—came together there during the period from 1930–1960 to usher in a new era in brain science. Prodigiously researched, beautifully written, theoretically incisive, this book tells the story of how these figures were—to borrow from Hebb’s famous postulate that nerves that wire together, fire together—‘wired together’ through a series of momentous interdisciplinary collaborations to produce foundational work in the treatment of epilepsy, in cognitive and memory science, and in the science of vision. It was these collaborations, Prkachin persuasively argues, that laid the foundations for much of today’s neuroscience.” – Andreas Killen, author of “Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War”

Yvan Prkachin is a senior research associate at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich.