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Editorial
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Neuroscientists assume that the deceptively amorphous macroscopic appearance of the brain conceals untold complexities of regional specification; that distributed function is reflected by variations in structure; and vice versa. Superficially, as it were, these beliefs are expressed as the phrenological maps that Franz Josef Gall and Johann Caspar Spurzheim started to produce from the 1790s. But as the bumpy road to phrenology was revised in the late 19th century by accumulating evidence for brain ‘centres’ provided by experimental and disease-related focal lesions, three books placed the emerging doctrine of cerebral localization under the microscope and classified the cerebral cortex into over 100 discrete areas based on differences in cytoarchitectonics: Alfred W Campbell's Histological studies on the localisation of cerebral function (1905); Karl Brodmann's Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Grosshirnrinde (1909), translated as Brodmann's ‘Localisation in the cerebral cortex’ (1994) and Constantin von Economo and George N Koskinas's Die Cytoarchitektonik
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