AUTHOR=Delgado-García José M. TITLE=Cajal and the Conceptual Weakness of Neural Sciences JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroanatomy VOLUME=9 YEAR=2015 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroanatomy/articles/10.3389/fnana.2015.00128 DOI=10.3389/fnana.2015.00128 ISSN=1662-5129 ABSTRACT=

The experimental and conceptual contributions of Santiago Ramón y Cajal remain almost as fresh and valuable as when his original proposals were published more than a century ago—a rare example, contrasting with other related sciences. His basic concepts on the neuron as the main building block of the central nervous system, the dynamic polarization principle as a way to understand how neurons deal with ongoing active processes, and brain local structural arrangements as a result of the functional specialization of selected neural circuits are concepts still surviving in present research papers dealing with brain function during the performance of cognitive and/or behavioral activities. What is more, the central dogma of the Neuroscience of today, i.e., brain plasticity as the morpho-functional substrate of memory and learning processes, was already proposed and documented with notable insights by Ramón y Cajal. From this background, I will try to discuss in this chapter which new functional and structural concepts have been introduced in contemporary Neuroscience and how we will be able to construct a set of basic principles underlying brain functions for the twenty-first century.