Neuroscience, a study of the nervous system, would be a difficult concept to grasp if there was no prior research done about the nervous system. The study of the nervous system reverts to ancient Egypt, since the discovery of trephination. Trephination is a surgical operation which involves drilling, cutting, and scraping a piece of bone from the skull. During the Middle Ages, this procedure was thought to liberate any demons from the heads which was considered to be possessed. For this surgical operation, the instrument that was used was a trephan. The purpose of trephination is to cure headaches, and relieve pressure related to brain swelling. Furthermore, trephination healed mental disorders; for example, epilepsy and schizophrenia. Finger (2001) informs that many people who underwent this surgical operation survived. The people who survived showed evidence of their skull healing; others showed no evidence of healing and these people died after or during the operation.
In addition, people in Egypt believed that the heart was the “seat of intelligence” and not the brain. Some of the Greek scientists supported this view, whereas some of them opposed this concept. This conception was challenged when Hippocrates, a Greek physician, believed that the brain controlled all the senses and the movements and the brain was the “seat of intelligence.” Moreover, Plato, Greek philosopher, believed that in the brain laid the rational part of the tripartite soul. According to Plato, the soul was composed of three parts, which were the appetite, reason, and temper. However, Aristotle, a Greek philosopher and a disciple of Plato, believed that the heart was the “seat of intelligence” and the heart was the source of all mental process. This notion was accepted until Galen, a Roman anatomist and physician, noticed that mental disorders were caused due to some sort of damage in the