Brain Imaging: From Ramón Y Cajal Epoch to Our Days

The human brain is an evolution miracle. The brain can be considered the more complicated object in the universe. Any effort to understand the brain is important, and will lead to an improved understanding of our origins and of future pathways of evolution. Being as much conscious as possible of this marvel of nature will bring further understanding of ourselves. There have been extraordinary advances in neuroscience. Multiple new science subdivisions are emerging, mainly trying to interpret in a neurologic way the many aspects of human knowledge. Up until recently, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropharmacology were the pillars for studying the brain mechanisms. During the last decades, new science has emerged to include modern aspects of neurogenetic or computational neuroanatomy. We are a long way to fully understand the human brain function. However, we are capable enough to decipher how the brain is structured and how the brain operates. Thus, we will review here the main concepts of the brain function and the progress in neuroscience knowledge. In this chapter, we will review the techniques used to understand the human brain, in a sequential way from the time of Ramon y Cajal to our days. We will focus in new techniques to process and analyze medical neuroimaging.