Wired Together: The Montreal Neurological Institute and the Origins of Neuroscience

Examines the role of an influential neurological institute in shaping a new, interdisciplinary science-neuroscience-and advancing it worldwide. Wired Together explains the rise of neuroscience by tracing the history of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and the men and women who transformed it into neuroscience’s most innovative and productive research site.Opened by neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in 1934, the MNI pioneered the surgical treatment of epilepsy and transformed the operating theater into a new kind of scientific laboratory for investigating the functions of the brain.But more than that, the MNI became a crucial site for forming new interdisciplinary practices.These involved, as Yvan Prkachin puts it, wiring together new assemblies of physicians, surgeons, and scientists into a growing network that made possible the emergence of an interdisciplinary science of the brain. Wired Together also traces how the MNI and its network of scientists spread this new interdisciplin