history of ideas about the brain

'Brain in a vat' by Hilary Putnam from Reason, Truth, and History (1981):

"Imagine that a human being…has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person's brain…has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person…is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings."

In this article Carl Zimmer tracks the transition of ideas about the brain in history.

http://beinghuman.org/article/cooling-system-thinking-machine