Behavioral neuroscience

Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals. Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals. Behavioral neuroscience as a scientific discipline emerged from a variety of scientific and philosophical traditions in the 18th and 19th centuries. In philosophy, people like René Descartes proposed physical models to explain animal as well as human behavior. Descartes suggested that the pineal gland, a midline unpaired structure in the brain of many organisms, was the point of contact between mind and body. Descartes also elaborated on a theory in which the pneumatics of bodily fluids could explain reflexes and other motor behavior. This theory was inspired by moving statues in a garden in Paris. Electrical stimulation and lesions can also show the affect of motor behavior of humans. They can record the electrical activity of actions, hormones, chemicals and effects drugs have in the body system all which affect ones daily behavior. Other philosophers also helped give birth to psychology. One of the earliest textbooks in the new field, The Principles of Psychology by William James, argues that the scientific study of psychology should be grounded in an understanding of biology. The emergence of psychology and behavioral neuroscience as legitimate sciences can be traced from the emergence of physiology from anatomy, particularly neuroanatomy. Physiologists conducted experiments on living organisms, a practice that was distrusted by the dominant anatomists of the 18th and 19th centuries. The influential work of Claude Bernard, Charles Bell, and William Harvey helped to convince the scientific community that reliable data could be obtained from living subjects. Even before the 18th and 19th century, behavioral neuroscience was beginning to take form as far back as 1700 B.C. The question that seems to continually arise is: what is the connection between the mind and body? The debate is formally referred to as the mind-body problem. There are two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind–body problem; monism and dualism. Plato and Aristotle are two of several philosophers who participated in this debate. Plato believed that the brain was where all mental thought and processes happened. Contrastly, Aristotle believed that the brain served the purpose of cooling down the emotions derived from the heart. The mind-body problem was a stepping stone toward attempting to understand the connection between the mind and body. Another debate arose about localization of function or functional specialization versus equipotentiality which played a significant role in the development in behavioral neuroscience. As a result of localization of function research, many famous people found within psychology have come to various different conclusions. Wilder Penfield was able to develop a map of the cerebral cortex through studying epileptic patients along with Rassmussen. Research on localization of function has led behavioral neuroscientists to a better understanding of which parts of the brain control behavior. This is best exemplified through the case study of Phineas Gage. The term 'psychobiology' has been used in a variety of contexts, emphasizing the importance of biology, which is the discipline that studies organic, neural and cellular modifications in behavior, plasticity in neuroscience, and biological diseases in all aspects, in addition, biology focuses and analyzes behavior and all the subjects it is concerned about, from a scientific point of view. In this context, psychology helps as a complementary, but important discipline in the neurobiological sciences. The role of psychology in this questions is that of a social tool that backs up the main or strongest biological science. The term 'psychobiology' was first used in its modern sense by Knight Dunlap in his book An Outline of Psychobiology (1914). Dunlap also was the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Psychobiology. In the announcement of that journal, Dunlap writes that the journal will publish research '...bearing on the interconnection of mental and physiological functions', which describes the field of behavioral neuroscience even in its modern sense. In many cases, humans may serve as experimental subjects in behavioral neuroscience experiments; however, a great deal of the experimental literature in behavioral neuroscience comes from the study of non-human species, most frequently rats, mice, and monkeys. As a result, a critical assumption in behavioral neuroscience is that organisms share biological and behavioral similarities, enough to permit extrapolations across species. This allies behavioral neuroscience closely with comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and neurobiology. Behavioral neuroscience also has paradigmatic and methodological similarities to neuropsychology, which relies heavily on the study of the behavior of humans with nervous system dysfunction (i.e., a non-experimentally based biological manipulation). Synonyms for behavioral neuroscience include biopsychology, biological psychology, and psychobiology. Physiological psychology is a subfield of behavioral neuroscience, with an appropriately narrower definition