Human brain

“ Were there not in the human brain a potency antecedent to all experience, a dog or a cat ought to be as capable of education as man. These predetermined internal relations are independent of the experiences of the individual. The human brain is the 'organised register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human organism has been reached. ”

“ What is the obvious inference? It is that the ability to co-ordinate impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies the pre-existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What is the meaning of the human brain? It is that the many established relations among its parts stand for so many established relations among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections among the fibers of the cerebral masses answers to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the race. ”

“ I stated that I had found it impossible to symbolise by any mechanical or chemical peculiarity that tendency of the human brain to focalise its activity on small points which seems to constitute the essence of its reasoning power. But if such focalisation be really due not so much to structural peculiarity as to the emphasising power of an efficacious consciousness superadded, the case need no longer perplex us. ”

“ The Brain possessed with a "life" and with a personality of its own.
2. That personality expresses itself in the form of human speech although the voice is synthetic or mechanical.
3. The instrument used by The Brain for the expression of its personality is a "pulsemeter," i.e. essentially a television radio.
4. The locale of The Brain's self-expression is the "pineal gland" supposed to be seat of extrasensory apperception in the human brain. ”

“ I am aware that the latest investigations seem to establish the mind more as a function of the nervous system and the vital organs than of the brain. Whether the brain is like a telephone exchange and is only concerned with automatically receiving and sending out messages to the different parts of the body, or whether it registers impressions and compares them and is the seat of consciousness and thought, is not important in this discussion. Whatever mind may be, or through whatever part of the human system it may function, can make no difference in the conclusions I have reached. ”

“ The characters of the brain vary immensely, nothing being less constant than the form and size of the cerebral hemispheres, and the richness of the convolutions upon their surface, while the most changeable structures of all in the human brain, are exactly those on which the unwise attempt has been made to base the distinctive characters of humanity, viz. ”

“ The human will, like all other functions of the brain (sensation, imagination, ratiocination) , is dependent upon the anatomy of this organ and is necessarily determined by the inherited and acquired characteristics of the individual brain. ”

“ By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; that in the future it may be different; ”

“ Popular thought, supported by desires common to all human beings, readily accepts the view that mind is essentially different from matter, that its laws are in every respect different from the laws of material nature, and that the brain, being a part of the material nature, is simply the special tool used by the mind in its intercourse with nature. ”

“ What we observe without, in this way, constitutes the sphere of objective psychology. But there is another capital source of a knowledge of mind, which comes from investigating the organic structures and functions by which it is manifested in all its grades and forms. We here study the brain and nervous system, tracing its evolution from the lowest germ to the highest development, and tracing the growth of the brain of man from its embryonic rudiments to the mature and perfected structure. ”

“ Take them in their union and we see at once what the brain is—a great exchange office or switchboard, where the stimuli that come from the outer world are received and switched on to their responsive movements. We see also what the mind is, it is the whole scheme of our activity, and we see how it functions by bringing the field of our activity to consciousness. ”

“ But it is not only by experiments such as this that we make the discovery that there is a close and intimate relation between the mind and the brain, a relation which makes the mind dependent on the brain. ”

“ All that we can discover by help of our senses and by reasoning upon their information is the existence of a wonderful [73] piece of Mechanism—the brain—by which the functions of Mind are performed and whose structure regulates the entire character of the Mind.
It is conclusively established that the individual Self, in its normal state of relationship to the body, can receive and convey impressions only through the medium of the brain. Remove the brain and mind ceases to be, although life may linger long. ”

“ Our habitual associations of ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. And the possible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain. If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I sketched for you but a short while ago. Our ideas would be determined by brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws. ”

“ How do we know that there is a world outside of our body of which the body is a part? Because a certain process has taken place in a certain portion of our brain. And how do we know that this process has taken place? ”

“ This then is the answer we give to the question why it is that the mind seems to be, and yet cannot be, produced by the brain. The mind guides and controls what the body does, it directs the body’s actions. ”

“ Every one has long known that, without the brain, intelligence is not possible, but experiment has discovered exactly the part that is played by each portion of the organ. It teaches us that consciousness, or intelligence properly so called, resides in the cerebral lobes, while the lower portions of the brain contain nervous centres destined for organic functions of a lower kind. ”

“ When we emerge from this necessary field of labor, we come to those functions peculiar to the proper brain. Here all is continual action. Thought, imagination, will, the conflicting passions, language, and even articulation, claim their first impulse from the nervous centre. The idlest reverie, as well as the most profound study, taxes the brain. ”

“ Let us hear what the two leading nervous physiologists, of this country, have to say upon this point:
'The brain is not, strictly speaking, the organ of the mind, for this statement would imply that the mind exists as a force, independent of the brain; but the mind is produced by the brain substance; and intellectual force, if we may term the intellect a force, can be produced only by the transmutation of a certain amount of matter ”

“ However, of contemplation there are various stages, determined in us phenomenal individuals by the various sizes and powers of our purely phenomenal brains. Why any intelligence exists at all, and why it is phenomenally associated with a brain, nobody can explain. The will thus likes to express itself. ”

“ There is no more interesting subject of inquiry open just now than that of the interaction between the thoughts of the mind and the configuration of the brain. The fair conclusion appears to be that each is greatly the cause of the other; that the character of the persistent thoughts actually shapes the cerebrum, while on the configuration of this organ depends in turn the manner of thoughts we think. Now, thought is, for the most part, automatic. We think, without intention or effort, as we have been accustomed to think, just as we walk or write without any conscious arrangement of muscles. ”

“ But, as a matter of fact, like other fundamental questions, this is exactly as it has ever been, and so far as Science is concerned, we are just as much in the dark respecting it as men ever were. Though the philosophers of former days were unaware of all the departmental details of brain activity, they understood as well as we do the essential point, that in our composite nature soul and body form one being, whose every operation is of mixed character like itself. ”

“ The chapter on "General Conditions of Brain-Activity" is unexpectedly meagre for a writer who proposes to treat psychology as a natural science, without metaphysics, and from a point of view which finds the ascertainable conditions of psychological phenomena solely in brain-processes. ”

“ The use of the brain along chosen lines will, on well-known physiological principles, increase its organization and therefore its power for manifesting psychic phenomena. These two factors will continue to act and react in the future as they have in the past, increased psychical activity enlarging the brain, and the more highly organized brain augmenting the psychic phenomena. What is true of the mind in general is also true of its varied manifestations. ”

“ Modern psychology has rendered a service of far-reaching practical benefit in showing more definitely the intimate connection between the brain and mental action. In this connection of body and soul the two are correlated; the brain is organic to the functions of the soul. ”

“ For whether, indeed, thought is regarded as a mere function of the brain and the state of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the state of the brain, or whether mental states and brain states are held to be two versions, in two different languages, of one and the same original, in either case it is laid down that, could we penetrate into the inside of a brain at work and behold the dance of the atoms which make up the cortex, and if, on the other hand, we possessed the key to psycho-physiology, we should know every detail of what is going on in the corresponding consciousness. ”

“ In ordinary discourse we use the words brain and mind as interchangeable terms, because it is quite evident that where there is lack of intelligence there is deficiency in the brain and where there is a high degree of intelligence there is a correspondingly high development of brain. The immense advance in recent times in our knowledge of the physiology of cerebral process serves more and more to emphasize the entire and absolute dependence of mind on brain, and particularly of the higher processes of mind on the development of the cells and fibres of the cerebral cortex. ”

“ This is the theory which presents great fascination to the student of physical science. By laborious investigation physiology has established the fact beyond the reach of rational dispute, that there is a constant relation of concomitancy between cerebral action and thought. Within experience mind is found in constant and definite association with that highly complex and peculiar disposition of matter called a living brain. The size and elaboration of this peculiar structure throughout the animal kingdom stand in conspicuous proportion to the degree of intelligence displayed ”

“ The importance of the brain as the seat of the faculties of the mind, is pre-eminent in the animal economy. Hence, the avidity with which its structure and functions have been studied in our time; for, although much remains to be explained, much has certainly been accomplished. We have reason to believe, not only that the brain is the center of the whole series of mental manifestations, but that its several parts are so many organs, each one of which performs its peculiar and distinctive office. ”

“ It must be frankly confessed that in no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields of consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner constitution which they do have. They certainly follow or accompany our brain states, and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences and education. But, if we ask just how the brain conditions them, we have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just how the education moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most abstract, general, and conjectural terms. ”

“ If we do not know just how the cerebral cells evolve thought, we do know that thought is evolved by them or through them, and that various diseases of the brain and nervous system—now pretty well understood, but of which, twenty years ago, little or nothing was known—may utterly destroy the objective worth of thought, and render it, scientifically speaking, valueless. ”

“ To think of The Brain, a machine raising question about the nature of the Deity! The Brain asking information about God and man and heaven and hell with the simplicity of a stranger who asks the nearest cop: "Which way to the city hall?" Just like that. As if philosophers and religionists and common men had not raked their brains in vain over these problems for the last ten thousand years. ”

“ But considered simply in itself and according to the rules we apply to all our deductions and inferences, if the mind is simply a product of the brain it is then something potentially present in the brain or present in the materials supplied to the brain before it is actually produced, and this something cannot be what is happening outside the brain or that did or will happen outside the brain. ”