rom a silver stain to a wiring diagram of a fly. Dates are of publication unless noted; where we found no reliable reference we give the event without one.

in the tour: the room called "The black reaction" has a placard called "Who was right." ···

1873	Camillo Golgi describes the "black reaction", a silver stain that blackens a few nerve cells whole.
1888	Cajal applies Golgi's stain to bird cerebellum and argues that nerve cells are separate units: the neuron doctrine.
1897	Sherrington names the junction between nerve cells the synapse.
1906	Golgi and Cajal share the Nobel Prize (Nobel Prize Outreach, 1906) and disagree in their lectures. Sherrington's Integrative Action (Sherrington, C. S., 1906).
1921	Loewi shows that a nerve acts on the heart through a chemical.
1937	Penfield and Boldrey map the motor and sensory strip in patients. The homunculus.
1943	McCulloch and Pitts: neurons as logic.
1949	Hebb: cell assemblies, and the learning rule that bears his name.
1950	Lashley, "In search of the engram."
1952	Hodgkin and Huxley write the equations of the nerve impulse. Archive page.
1953	William Scoville removes much of both medial temporal lobes from Henry Molaison (operation).
1957	Scoville and Milner report H.M.'s amnesia. Archive page.
1959	Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch and Pitts, the frog's eye; Hubel and Wiesel, the cat's cortex.
1962	Gazzaniga, Bogen and Sperry on split-brain patients; Hubel and Wiesel on functional architecture.
1969	Walter Pitts dies in May, Warren McCulloch in September.
1973	Bliss and Lømo: long-term potentiation.
1980	Fukushima's neocognitron borrows the cat's hierarchy for a machine.
1981	Hubel, Wiesel and Sperry share the Nobel Prize.
1982	Hopfield nets.
1986	White and colleagues: the wiring of the worm C. elegans, 302 neurons.
1994	Damasio and colleagues reconstruct Gage's injury.
1999	Rao and Ballard: predictive coding in visual cortex.
2002	Graziano and colleagues: motor cortex as a map of actions.
2008	Henry Molaison dies in December. Kriegeskorte and colleagues: representational similarity analysis.
2010	Friston: the free-energy principle.
2012	Liu and colleagues reactivate a tagged memory with light; a false one follows in 2013.
2014	Yamins and colleagues: networks trained on images predict monkey visual cortex. Annese and colleagues section H.M.'s brain.
2017	Jonas and Kording turn neuroscience's methods on a microprocessor.
2020	Brain-Score ranks models against the brain.
2023	Gordon and colleagues find the motor strip interrupted.
2024	FlyWire: the wiring of an adult fly brain. Shapson-Coe and colleagues: a cubic millimetre of human cortex.

Sources

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2. Sherrington, C. S. (1906). The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons; New Haven: Yale University Press. The Silliman lectures of 1904. Public domain. archive.org/details/integrativeactio00sher
3. Loewi (1921). Über humorale Übertragbarkeit der Herznervenwirkung. Pflügers Archiv für die Gesamte Physiologie des Menschen und der Tiere. doi:10.1007/bf01738910
4. Penfield & Boldrey (1937). Somatic motor and sensory representation in the cerebral cortex of man as studied by electrical stimulation. Brain. doi:10.1093/brain/60.4.389
5. McCulloch & Pitts (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. doi:10.1007/BF02478259
6. Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. New York: Wiley.
7. Lashley, K. S. (1950). "In search of the engram." Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, vol. 4, Physiological Mechanisms in Animal Behaviour. Cambridge University Press.
8. Hodgkin & Huxley (1952). A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1952.sp004764
9. Scoville & Milner (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry. doi:10.1136/jnnp.20.1.11
10. Lettvin et al. (1959). What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain. Proceedings of the IRE. doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1959.287207
11. Hubel & Wiesel (1959). Receptive fields of single neurones in the cat's striate cortex. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1959.sp006308
12. Gazzaniga, Bogen & Sperry (1962). Some functional effects of sectioning the cerebral commissures in man. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.48.10.1765
13. Hubel & Wiesel (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1962.sp006837
14. Bliss & Lømo (1973). Long‐lasting potentiation of synaptic transmission in the dentate area of the anaesthetized rabbit following stimulation of the perforant path. The Journal of Physiology. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1973.sp010273
15. Fukushima (1980). Neocognitron: A self-organizing neural network model for a mechanism of pattern recognition unaffected by shift in position. Biological Cybernetics. doi:10.1007/bf00344251
16. Hopfield (1982). Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.79.8.2554
17. White et al. (1986). The structure of the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences. doi:10.1098/rstb.1986.0056
18. Damasio et al. (1994). The Return of Phineas Gage: Clues About the Brain from the Skull of a Famous Patient. Science. doi:10.1126/science.8178168
19. Rao & Ballard (1999). Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects. Nature Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/4580
20. Graziano, Taylor & Moore (2002). Complex Movements Evoked by Microstimulation of Precentral Cortex. Neuron. doi:10.1016/s0896-6273(02)00698-0
21. Kriegeskorte (2008). Representational similarity analysis – connecting the branches of systems neuroscience. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. doi:10.3389/neuro.06.004.2008
22. Friston (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/nrn2787
23. Liu et al. (2012). Optogenetic stimulation of a hippocampal engram activates fear memory recall. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature11028
24. Ramirez et al. (2013). Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus. Science. doi:10.1126/science.1239073
25. Yamins et al. (2014). Performance-optimized hierarchical models predict neural responses in higher visual cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1403112111
26. Annese et al. (2014). Postmortem examination of patient H.M.’s brain based on histological sectioning and digital 3D reconstruction. Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/ncomms4122
27. Jonas & Kording (2017). Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?. PLOS Computational Biology. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268
28. Schrimpf et al. (2020). Integrative Benchmarking to Advance Neurally Mechanistic Models of Human Intelligence. Neuron. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2020.07.040
29. Gordon et al. (2023). A somato-cognitive action network alternates with effector regions in motor cortex. Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05964-2
30. Dorkenwald et al. (2024). Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain. Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07558-y
31. Shapson-Coe et al. (2024). A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution. Science. doi:10.1126/science.adk4858

see also