How the Self Controls Its Brain - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

How the Self Controls Its Brain is a book by Sir John Eccles

John Carew Eccles

John Carew Eccles, AC FRS FRACP FRSNZ FAAS was an Australian neurophysiologist who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin....

, proposing a theory of philosophical dualism

Dualism

Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...

, and offering a justification of how there can be mind-brain action without violating the principle of the conservation of energy

Conservation of energy

The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...

. The model was developed jointly with the nuclear physicist Friedrich Beck

Friedrich Beck

Friedrich Hans Beck was a German physicist. His research interests were focused on superconductivity, nuclear and elementary particle physics, relativistic quantum field theory, and late in his life, biophysics and theory of consciousness.-Early life and education:Beck was born in Wiesbaden, Germany...

in the period 1991-1992.

Eccles called the fundamental neural units of the cerebral cortex

Cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex is a sheet of neural tissue that is outermost to the cerebrum of the mammalian brain. It plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness. It is constituted of up to six horizontal layers, each of which has a different...

"dendrons", which are cylindrical bundles

Cortical column

A cortical column, also called hypercolumn or sometimes cortical module, is a group of neurons in the brain cortex which can be successively penetrated by a probe inserted perpendicularly to the cortical surface, and which have nearly identical receptive fields...

of neurons arranged vertically in the six outer layers or laminae of the cortex, each cylinder being about 60 micrometre

Micrometre

A micrometer , is by definition 1×10-6 of a meter .In plain English, it means one-millionth of a meter . Its unit symbol in the International System of Units is μm...

s in diameter. Eccles proposed that each of the 40 million dendrons is linked with a mental unit, or "psychon", representing a unitary conscious

Consciousness

Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

experience. In willed actions and thought, psychons act on dendrons and, for a moment, increase the probability of the firing of selected neuron

Neuron

A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...

s through quantum tunneling effect in synaptic

Synapse

In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell...

exocytosis

Exocytosis

Exocytosis , also known as 'The peni-cytosis', is the durable process by which a cell directs the contents of secretory vesicles out of the cell membrane...

, while in perception the reverse process takes place.

See also