Brain and Language 71, 33–35 (2000)doi:10.1006/brln.1999.2204, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Neuropsychology in the Next Century: I Wish, I Wish

Daniel N. Bub

Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Neuropsychology has had its ups and downs over the past century, fromthe failed analytic program of the early diagram makers to the more data-driven, but ultimately sterile ordering of clinical phenomena that followedin its wake. During the past twenty years, there has been much renewedactivity on the question of the functional organization of mental systems,spurred by developments in the cognitive sciences and most recently, a veri-table explosion of interest in neural systems mediating higher level abilitiesthat the new technology of functional imaging has engendered. Clearly, thereis a sense of excitement and optimism among researchers. The twentiethcentury has been a time of almost unbelievable progress in physics and biol-ogy; in these domains certain basic questions about the nature of animate andinanimate matter have been answered definitively. Given the technologicalresources in the offing, scientists preoccupied with the neurological bases ofhigher cognitive function may well feel optimistic about the future. Sir JohnMaddox, former editor of Nature, has this to say about the mysteries ofconsciousness: ‘‘It will be good luck if the careful tracing of neuronal con-nections on which hundreds of neuroanatomists are now engaged quicklyleads to an account of the circuitry of consciousness. Probably new tech-niques will be required before the goal is truly within sight. But that the goalis attainable seems now to be plain’’ (p. 307).

There is perhaps, an ominous undercurrent to this feeling of excitement,at least if you are someone who spends his or her time musing over brainand language at the systems level (presumably, the majority of the readersof this journal). Notice that the above quote has a definite orientation, onein which deep conundrums about mind are ultimately thought to be resolv-able by the ‘‘careful tracing of neuronal connections.’’ Indeed, Maddoxleaves little doubt about the relative importance of the cognitive and neuro-

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Daniel N. Bub, Ph.D., Department of Psy-chology, University of Victoria, Victoria BC V8S 3P5, Canada. E-mail: dbub@uvvm.uvic.ca.

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sciences when considering the question of where fundamental progress is tobe expected. Thus, as he puts it in looking to the future, ‘‘With the prospectthat there may soon be an explanation in terms of how neurons are organizedand behave, it is inevitable that psychology has largely become a handmaidenof neuroscience (with fancy names such as ‘‘cognitive psychology’’ to markthe change)’’ (p. 278).

What does the future hold for cognitive neuropsychology in the next cen-tury? Will it just be a ‘‘fancy name’’ for a particular type of neuroscienceconducted at the level of cortical circuitry? For cognitive analyses of brainand mind to endure as an independent field, we need to take to heart someof the lessons that can be learned from the methodology of population think-ing in biology. It is interesting that many of the issues facing cognitive neur-opsychology are similar to those that are fundamental to biology. Theseinclude the central issue of how to classify individuals, what features ofcomparison to use in developing adequate systems of classification, and howdifferences between individuals should be evaluated in attempts to under-stand their significance.

Biology has reached its current development because it successfully metthese basic challenges, but for neuropsychology they remain formidable ob-stacles. Unlike the observations of early biologists, whose work laid the foun-dation for modern developments in molecular biology, neuropsychologicalevidence has not yet revealed general organizing principles underlying di-verse and seemingly unrelated functional systems. Are there few or none tobe had, or is their current absence due to a lack of adequate methodology?What, for example, does Broca’s area really do, and does its function extendbeyond language into other domains? Why such little progress on this basicquestion despite a century of effort? Aside from the obvious possibility thatunderstanding cognitive differences between individual patients is just verymuch harder than the morphological differences between animals, neuropsy-chology suffers from a logistic constraint that does not apply to biologists.While any biologist will have access to thousands of individuals for compari-son, a researcher analyzing brain-damaged cases is limited to a mere snippetof relevant variation. Progress in understanding the differences between re-lated brain-damaged cases, and in understanding how surface phenomenarelate at a functional level, needs a more detailed comparative approach thanone that can be mustered by any single researcher.

So here is a wish for the future: I wish that certain difficult problems, saythe question of what to infer about the organization of semantic memoryfrom cases of category-specific agnosia, are routinely tackled by interestedneuropsychologists banding together into consortia, so that papers focus onthe pattern of the variation over many individuals rather than the observationsgleaned from one or two cases. This does not mean averaging data, of course,but the refinement of genuine population thinking applied to neuropsycho-logical issues. We have very few examples of sophisticated versions of this

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approach in our literature. It is only via such a comparative methodologythat we will perceive deeper connections and richer explanatory conceptsrelating to cognitive function.

REFERENCE

Maddox, J. 1998. What remains to be discovered. New York: Simon and Schuster.