Monday, 29 October 2012
Dusting Off the Triune Brain and the Limbic System
In neuroscience, as in other fields, some concepts are so convenient that it no longer even occurs to us to question them. But no scientific knowledge can be taken for granted forever, so it makes sense to take such old concepts down from the shelf and dust them off from time to time.
Recently, two neuroanatomists, Pierre-Yves Risold and Helmut Wicht, did just that with two models—the “triune brain” and the “limbic system”—that have become questionable, to say the least, in light of more recent neuroanatomical findings.
To summarize the flaws thus found in these two models, as well as the ways in which they may still be useful, we have made the following changes in The Brain from Top to Bottom:
– We have added a History module, The Triune Brain and the Limbic System: What To Keep, What To Discard.
– We have added a link to this module on the page where we discuss the limbic system, as well as on the page where we discuss Papez’s circuit, a subset of the limbic system.
– On both of these pages, we have also added a link to a History module that already appeared on this site but is highly relevant to the present discussion: The Quest for the “Emotional Brain”.
– We have also added the same cautionary information to the page where we describe the three components of the triune brain according to the theory that Paul MacLean began to popularize in the 1960s.
Avez-vous un « cerveau reptilien » ?
Émotions : mais où est le système limbique ?
Emotions and the Brain, Evolution and the Brain | Comments Closed
