Towards a Cognitive Gliascience: a Brief Conceptual Framework

It is said that the Pythagorean Alcmeon of Croton was one of the first philosophers that considered the brain as the seat of mind and was, probably, the founder of experimental psychology (McCulloch, 1955); this idea was then considered true by Galen, during the Roman Empire, Mondino de Liuzzi, during the Middle Age, and Andreas Vesalius and Leonardo da Vinci in the Modern era. Moreover, Golgi, in the 19 century, discovered a method of staining nervous tissue and, more recently, has been discovered a new method for glia: the modified Golgi-Cox one (Ranjan & Mallick,2012). The concept of glia, that represents the majority of brain cells, as an interstitial substance which supplies a structural ground of the cerebrum and spinal cord and ties neurons together was, ab initio, created by Rudolf Virchow (1858), that, in effect, never regarded the cellular being of this substance; in Virchow opinion, neuroglia was not more than a type of extracellular linking structure, and he usually called it the ‘’cement of neurons’’. Very soon, nevertheless, the cellular pattern of glial cells was detected and many kinds of glial cells were discovered (Golgi,1871; Cajal Ramon,1913), at a time that still came before the formulation of the neuronal doctrine, introduced by Ramon y Cajal. The stream turned in the 2000s and lately the relevance of glia in formation of central nervous system circuits get more precise. The current brief review will consider the actual opinion on central nervous system organization grounded on dynamic neuronal-glial networks, developing some seminal ideas contained in a previous paper (Spadaro,2013:4) for a foundation of a new, interdisciplinary area of research.