Cronología de la investigación sobre la dinámica cerebral de Justo Gonzalo / Chronology of Justo Gonzalo’s research on brain dynamics

Introducción: El neurocientífico español Justo Gonzalo y Rodríguez-Leal (1910-1986) investiga la organización funcional de la corteza cerebral durante más de cuatro décadas. Sus hallazgos le llevan a formular una teoría neurofisiológica basada en las leyes de la excitabilidad nerviosa, que denomina dinámica cerebral. En el presente trabajo se expone de forma cronológica cómo surgen las principales ideas sobre las que se articula.Desarrollo: En 1939 Gonzalo observa los denominados fenómenos de acción dinámica: desfasamiento, facilitación y repercusión cerebral. Le siguen dos principios: efecto cerebral de la lesión según la magnitud y posición (1941), y organización sensorial, según un desarrollo espiral (1947). Paralelamente, caracteriza lo que llama el síndrome central de la corteza cerebral. En la década de los cincuenta desarrolla los conceptos de gradiente cortical, similitud y alometría. En contraposición a las concepciones modulares de la corteza cerebral, en las que una región es responsable de una función, Gonzalo expresa que ‘los gradientes corticales dan la localización de los sistemas mientras la similitud y alometría revelan su trama funcional’.Conclusiones: La teoría de dinámica cerebral se articula en dos etapas. La primera (de 1938 a 1950) se caracteriza por una importante base clínica con observación de nuevos fenómenos y formulación de nuevos conceptos. La segunda (de 1950 a 1960) incluye la introducción de conceptos de mayor alcance, como el gradiente funcional cortical, y leyes de alometría que se basan en un cambio de escala. Actualmente, varios autores consideran que el concepto de gradiente es clave para entender la organización cerebral.(AU)

Introduction: The Spanish neuroscientist Justo Gonzalo y Rodríguez-Leal (1910-1986) investigated the functional organisation of the cerebral cortex over more than four decades. His findings led him to formulate a neurophysiological theory based on the laws of nervous excitability, which he called brain dynamics. This paper presents in chronological order how the main ideas on which it is based arose.Development: In 1939, Gonzalo observed the phenomena of dynamic action: asynchrony or disaggregation, facilitation and cerebral repercussion. This was followed by two principles: the cerebral effect of lesions according to their magnitude and position (1941), and spiral development of the sensory field (1947). At the same time, he characterised what he called the central syndrome of the cerebral cortex. In the 1950s he developed the concepts of the cortical gradient, similarity and allometry. In contrast to modular conceptions of the cerebral cortex, in which one region is responsible for one function, Gonzalo argued that ‘cortical gradients provide the location of systems, while similarity and allometry reveal their functional mechanism.’Conclusions: The theory of brain dynamics was established in two stages. The first (between 1938 and 1950) had an important clinical foundation, involving the observation of new phenomena and the formulation of new concepts. The second (between 1950 and 1960) included the introduction of more far-reaching concepts, such as the functional cortical gradient, and allometry laws based on a change of scale. Today, various authors believe that the concept of the gradient is crucial for understanding how the brain is organised.(AU)

Debate: Seeds as Deep Time Technologies.

This essay theorizes crop seeds as deep time technologies, surveying a range of materialist approaches to the study of agriculture, from historical materialism to agroecology and actor-network theory. Recent studies of plant domestication suggest that the long history of human-plant relations and agrarian knowledge defy the reduction of seeds to products of nature or objects of property. Approaching seeds as technologies allows us to understand the actors and processes of improvement that demarcate biological material according to commercial and scientific logics. Framing seeds as a collaborative technological project with a 19,000-year history unseats industrial time as the dominant frame in the history of technology. It recasts political economy not simply as a construction of human social relations of production but also as it imagines the material used to produce life itself.

Creating a User-Inventor Community: How Disabled People Innovated and Marketed Disability in Early Nineteenth-Century America.

Early nineteenth-century America's robust trade in medical and health care products is richly documented, yet many scholars have overlooked just what role people with impairments played in that industry as inventors and retailers, forming relationships with clients based on their shared experiences of disability. A study of newspaper advertisements, patents, organizational records, medical accounts, and objects suggests that many impaired and formerly impaired producers marketed products to impaired consumers, creating an organic and unselfconscious network of disabled people who made, sold, and bought knowledge and devices about and for disability. Recovering this world of disabled inventors, retailers, and their clients reveals how disability fueled innovation in early nineteenth-century America, expanding scholarly understandings of who participated in and profited from the burgeoning medical and health care economy. This study also suggests that the market was an early venue of disability community where people came together around their common bond.

How Effective Was the Global South Knowledge Exchange? The Chinese-Funded Medical Projects in Tanzania, 1968-1990s.

Knowledge circulation scholars have examined the North-South exchange as mainly one-way traffic, where the Global South is perceived as the recipient of knowledge from the Global North. In contrast, this article underscores Southern countries' role in technoscientific development by examining actors in Chinese-funded medical projects in Tanzania. It shows that Chinese sponsorship of Tanzania's health sector was critical not only in breaking the yoke of dependency on medical knowledge from the North but also in debunking the Global North narratives positing Africa as backward and lacking initiative in medical and industrial technologies. Employing qualitative analytical methods on pertinent archival, oral accounts and published sources, this article shows that despite the Sino-Tanzanian cooperation's potential, knowledge exchanges were arguably one-way rather than reciprocal, and the exchanged knowledge remained ineffective and unsustainable owing to ill-thought modus operandi from the onset.

Prison Papermaking: Colonial Ideals of Industrial Experimentation in India.

This article questions the economic rationale of colonial experimentation and prison labor, arguing that for many administrators a prison-based experiment's success mattered less than its existence. It examines the position of convict labor and penal discipline within colonial industrial experiments in colonial India, where convicts performed experiments for what one administrator described as "the most penal" form of labor, papermaking. The belief that Indian fibers could open a new export market for global papermaking meant that prisons became prominent sites of experimentation with new pulps. Regional prisons gained state monopolies for handmade paper, often decimating local independent producers. Yet prison and industrial officers counterintuitively positioned the frequent failures of papermaking experiments as a continuing potential source for industrial improvement. They argued that the failures demonstrated the need to improve discipline and supervision. Prison experiments slotted convicts into repetitive, mechanized roles that served European investigations into the utility of Indian products.

On the Cover: Showcasing China's On-the-Job Training in Rural Africa.

The cover of this issue of Technology and Culture illustrates how China implemented-and promoted-on-the-job training in Africa. The image shows a Tanzanian dentist practicing dentistry under the supervision of a Chinese doctor in rural Tanzania, probably in the 1970s. Despite the ineffectiveness of the on-the-job training model, the photograph attempts to project the success of the dental surgery techniques exchanged between China and Tanzania, using simple medical equipment rather than sophisticated medical knowledge. The rural setting reflects the ideological struggle of the Cold War era, when Chinese doctors and rural mobile clinics sought to save lives in the countryside, while doctors from other countries engaged in Cold War competition worked primarily in cities. This essay argues that images were essential propaganda tools during the Cold War and urges historians of technology to use images critically by considering the contexts that influenced their creation.

Who Invented the Possum? What Historians Can Learn from Disabled Innovation in Britain's Responaut Communities.

This article provides a new exploration of disabled innovation that transforms our understanding of collective contributions to the history of science and technology. It does so by showing how a user network galvanized individual inventions into disabled expertise by tracking the development of two technologies-the Selectascan/Possum and the adapted Loudspeaking Telephone. Hamraie and Fritsch's 2019 "Crip Technoscience Manifesto" defined "disabled expertise" by exploring how disabled technology modification has been devalued. This article takes up their manifesto's challenge to combine disability history with science and technology studies by analyzing the technologies discussed in Responaut, a British quarterly magazine published between 1963 and 1989. Responauts were people who depended on respirators to breathe. This technological interdependence meant that users adapted an extraordinary variety of technologies to live well with respirators and modify their personal environment.

The Launch of a Political Satellite: Constructing the Ming Tombs Reservoir and "Mass Engineering" in Communist China.

Archives and oral histories show that the Ming Tombs Reservoir was a showcase project in Communist China directed by and involving the country's top leaders. This was one of the first projects to rely on the mobilization of physical labor rather than specialized machinery, driven by a belief in self-reliance and the use of local resources. It argues that the focus on the "masses," rather than engineers or scientists, challenged established engineering procedures and technical traditions. Historical evidence suggests that adopting a "build while being designed" mindset and mobilizing the "masses," projects could be completed, but often in ways that ultimately proved less than optimal. The case study suggests that innovations fail when local enthusiasm and technical knowledge are not balanced. By focusing on the role of the "masses" in shaping a novel technological landscape, this article highlights "mass engineering" to better understand this model of native innovations and economic autarky.

How Prepaid Billing in Italy Helped Shape the Global Diffusion of Mobile Phones.

Why was Italy the first country to introduce prepaid mobile phone billing services in 1996? What was the key to its success that led seventy-five telecommunications operators to introduce prepaid billing by 1998 and accelerated the mass adoption of mobile phones around the world? This article examines why prepaid was successful in light of national policies and sociocultural shifts. Along with SMS, handhelds, GSM, and the digitization of mobile communications, prepaid billing played a role in the rapid and immense spread of the mobile phone worldwide. As an innovative means of paying for mobile phone usage, prepaid represented a departure from operators' previous mobile phone payment methods. The article argues that by overlooking the contribution of this form of payment, telephone historians, the media, and business scholars have ignored this important driver of the success of mobile phones.

Fixing the Huai River: Technology of Labor Formation in Maoist China, 1950-53.

This article contributes to the large-scale engineering scholarship by revealing the labor practices involved and the state's role in shaping them. It provides a history of labor formation through earthwork technology in China's 1950s Huai River Control Project. The Communist Party's approach to engineering and labor differed from its Nationalist predecessor's. The party mobilized millions of peasants to dig and move an astronomical amount of soil in a few years. This herculean feat was made possible by promoting "work methods" to encourage peasants' self-Taylorization. The campaign aimed to cultivate a habit to work efficiently in mass-scale collaboration under external instructions. Through promoting work methods, state-appointed cadres assumed a tutelage role that allowed them to replace labor foremen. A hierarchical cadre-laborer relationship emerged from the same labor process that changed the nation's landscape.

"One of the Grand Works of the World": Walt Whitman's Advocacy for the Brooklyn Waterworks, 1856-59.

When the Brooklyn Waterworks opened in 1859, it was one of America's most advanced water and sewer systems. Yet after Brooklyn was annexed by New York City, the waterworks' history slipped into obscurity, despite having a now-famous champion: the "poet of America," Walt Whitman, whose brother worked on the project. This article shows the Brooklyn poet's fierce, multiyear lobbying effort for the waterworks in various newspapers and introduces a wealth of newly recovered Whitman writings on the issue. As a journalist, Whitman exemplifies the nineteenth-century press as an intermediary between expert engineers and popular readers. The poet brought precise expertise, translated engineers' technical arguments into everyday language for his readers, and fought the resulting day-to-day political battles over construction in print. Whitman, then, is an underappreciated case study of the confluence of technology, public health, and local journalism.

European Technical Democracy? How Consumer Associations Did-or Did Not-Shape the 1980s Automotive Environmental Standards.

Did the 1980s automotive standards reflect the European Economic Community's move toward a "technical democracy" or a broader democratic deficit? In the early 1980s, Europe's automotive sector faced multiple challenges: the European Commission's desire to harmonize technical standards and achieve greater European integration, intense competition between manufacturers, and environmental issues like acid rain. Debates on reducing air pollution focused on unleaded petrol and catalytic converters. Two associations representing civil society in Brussels responded to the increase in environmental concerns with a 1982 joint campaign. Despite a rich historiography on pollutant emission standards, highlighting the strategies of governments and companies, no study has dealt with the role nongovernmental organizations played. Based on public and private archives, particularly those of the European Bureau of Consumers' Unions, this article argues the new regulations did not result from the EU's consultation with civil society organizations like consumer groups but rather with the automotive industry.

As Ceaseless as the Sea: How Modern Construction Machines Disrupted Canadian Senses and Sensibilities, 1870s-1940s.

Since the late nineteenth century, Canada has required modern construction machines for industrial growth. Thanks to their novelty and visibility, these machines entered the Canadian psyche, symbolizing hopes and fears about the relentless transformations of modernity. Metaphors depicting these machines as zoomorphic and monstruous reflected the environmental-technological infrastructures they built, which redefined nature through technologies like trains, ships, and automobiles. This article discusses how Anglo-Canadians, particularly Ontarians, interpreted technology, drawing parallels with the automobile's history. Both had a problematic coexistence with humans as equally empowering and oppressive mobile machines that were imposed on public spaces and constructed as necessary for progress. The builders used the machines' allure to present construction as an inclusive civic spectacle and foster public tolerance for their relentless disruptions. They accomplished this faster than the automobile industry came to dominate the streets, as evidenced by the celebration of "sidewalk superintendents," compared to the contentious reproach of "jaywalkers."

Feminism and Capitalism under the Nuclear Cloud & Barbie.

The Warner Brothers/Mattel movie Barbie is meant to be about feminism and capitalism in complicated, comical, and nuanced ways. It mostly succeeds in its dual purpose of comedy and inspiration. The doll's origin in 1959 places her and her consort, Ken, squarely in the context of the Cold War, although neither the movie nor the doll's long and successful marketing history acknowledges anything outside the sunny world of Barbie Land. The nuclear shadow does affect the movie's reception, however, in the form of international protests over the dashed lines scrawled on a supposed "World Map" in one scene. For nations in and around the South China Sea, the dashed lines evoke the specter of war in a nuclear age over claims to territorial sovereignty. Yet director Greta Gerwig's film is a runaway success, the first film solo directed by a woman to gross more than a billion dollars and counting.

"Modernism with a Soul": Designing and Building Communities for Corporate and Civic Life.

This essay explores how film, feature and documentary, can offer a new perspective on modernist architecture, industrial design, and urban planning. Through the lens of two young directors, Kogonada and Davide Maffei, it traces the histories of two twentieth-century company towns: Ivrea, Italy, headquarters of Italian business machine giant Olivetti, and Columbus, Indiana, U.S.A., home to Cummins Inc., a global leader in diesel engine design and manufacturing. Adriano Olivetti and J. Irwin Miller shared the conviction that modernist architecture and design had a decisive role to play not just in the economic health of their respective firms but in the civic health of their surrounding communities. These companies have long abandoned the corporate idealism of their founding patrons. In film, Ivrea and Columbus have become architectural time capsules that raise important questions about the transformative power of architecture and design in the face of an increasingly competitive global economy.

Nuclear Imaginaries and Power in Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is in awe of physics and the power it can bestow. Its central character is both mythic and human, and the film critiques and constructs the mythology surrounding him. The film presents science and technology as the individualized work of masculine genius, though it is ultimately more interested in nuclear weapons as political objects than as technological ones. Its nuclear imaginaries contain personal anxieties and stunning spectacle but also forget the nuclear uncanny and the human scale of nuclear weapons.

Reflections on assortative mating, social stratification, and genetics.

A recent report by G. Clark points to a sustained persistence of social status in England that extends vertically across several generations and horizontally across many levels of kinship. We seek to put his findings in historical perspective. We do so by relating them to two lines of thinking related to biological inheritance. One predated the rediscovery of Mendel's work and led to the field of quantitative genetics, which dealt on the whole with quasi-continuously varying traits. The other is based on the rediscovery itself and led to a reconciliation between quantitative genetics and discrete Mendelian elements of heredity. Both were enmeshed with the supposed need for, and societal consequences of, eugenics and assortative mating. Also on both issues, the significant ideas can be traced to R. A. Fisher, inspired in one case by F. Galton and in the other by J. A. Cobb, with strong support for Galton and Cobb coming from Karl Pearson. Clark's findings point to societal stratification, and assortative mating for wealth is a straightforward hypothesis to account for it. However, it should be noted that the findings support, but do not prove, the hypothesis.