ABSTRACT
The strategy of developing accounts of mechanisms to explain phenomena was widespread in biology, including in neuroscience, since the seventeenth century, it was only at the end of the twentieth century that philosophers began to characterize mechanistic explanations. K. Brodmann was a pioneer in invoking cytoarchitectural criteria – the types of neurons, the distribution of neurons between cortical layers. For neuroscientists interested in explaining cognitive activities, macro-scale mechanistic analysis will typically bottom out at the level of cortical columns or individual neurons, although in some instances it might continue to an account in terms of the molecules within different parts of a neuron and the operations they perform. However, since the neuroanatomical investigations of Lorente de No and others, it has been known that recurrent projections outnumber forward projections. One important consequence of synchronization of activity in brain areas is that neurons in an area are more likely to respond to stimuli from regions with which they are synchronized.
