This video we are going to be talking about the biological perspective or neuroscience which became very popular in the 1990s and is now a booming subfield of psychology today. So, this is a field that studies the relationship between the brain or the nervous system and behavior or mental processes. Historically speaking, humans have been trying to figure out how the brain works for thousands of years. Our first documented attempts at understanding the brain actually come from ancient Egypt about 3,700 years ago. So we've been at this for a while.
However, early neuroscience tended to involve studying brains that had been damaged in some way, either accidentally or purposefully in humans and animals. And this can be a useful technique, especially when you are deliberately damaging a specific part of the brain in a controlled animal trial. You can get some very useful information from that. However, this technique is just inherently limiting. You can only do so much, especially in humans.
Advancements in computers and other technology have really caused the field to grow rapidly since the 1990s, and we are getting better and better every single year as technology continues to improve. We now have multiple methodologies that we can use when studying neuroscience. So the main research question here is what are the biological mechanisms underlying human behavior and mental processes? And one important founder to be aware of is Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who was a Spanish neuroscientist and he is sometimes known as the father of modern neuroscience. Now, he was a very prolific researcher, he actually won a Nobel Prize, but he was the first person to actually propose that the nervous system is made up of cells.
Before this, people thought it was kind of like one big connected thing, and he was able to show that, no, it's actually millions and millions of these individual little cells. And he was also the first person to describe the structure of a neuron. And he was able to do that with this really novel staining technique that he and his colleague came up with where they could look at, like, a slice of brain with the stain on it under a microscope and they could see all of these amazing things. And he actually created thousands of very detailed anatomical drawings of nerve cells and neural networks. I highly recommend you look those up if you can. Many of them are actually in museums nowadays, but this is stuff he was able to do in the late 1800s. So obviously, he has been unable to see any of our modern advancements, but his work really laid a solid foundation for neuroscience to kind of kick off from, so we owe a lot to him. Alright. So that is our little introduction to the biological perspective.
We're going to have an entire chapter talking about the brain and neuroscience coming up for you very soon, so stick around for that, and I will see you in our next one. Bye bye.