Vida Demarin - Mind and Brain: Bridging Neurology and Psychiatry

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The brain as an organ and mind as its product and even more than that were for centuries a secret that many scientists tried to reveal. But only recently, during and following Decade of the Brain, with the introduction of neuroimaging methods, especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it was possible to get more data on these important topics. This was a kind of a golden era for neurology and psychiatry, disciplines that got tools for deeper searching and possibilities of getting answers to important questions, together with results from neuroscience and neurobiology.

This development enabled getting a broader field of the investigation, the interaction of several disciplines, new perspectives, and a more comprehensive view of mind and brain interaction.

Our Mind & Brain Congress was founded 60 years ago as a small gathering of colleagues with a special interest in brain diseases. From that time onward, it was intensively developingalways being international, interdisciplinary, focused at recent knowledge, spreading it among participants from all over the world, on the path of what was the founding idea of Pula School of Science and Humanity.

And today, with emerging a new discipline Psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology and its translation to clinical practice, our long-standing comprehensive approach to the interrelation and bridging of the mind and the brain could contribute to a better understanding of this challenging topic. As it is not possible to show in detail this huge area of interest, we have tried with a few examples in the following chapters to illustrate it from different perspectives.

Brain on the couch (author: Ivan ari, courtesy from the private collection)