The human brain is the inner universe through which all external events are perceived. That fact alone should ensure that neuroscience will eventually receive top priority in the list of human endeavors. The brain represents the pinnacle of sophistication in the realm of living systems. Yet it is an imperfect organ, whose failures in disease processes lead to the occupation of more than half of all hospital beds and whose variable performance in the healthy state contributes in undetermined degree to the world's social problems. Every significant advance in or understanding of the brain has...

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

The titling of this book - "Facing Reality" - came to me unbidden, presumably from my subconscious But, when it came, it seemed to be right, because that essentially is what I am trying to do in this book. " Facing" is to be understood in the sense of "looking at in a steadfast and unflinching manner." It thus contrasts with "Confronting" which has the sense of "looking at with hostility and defiance." As I face life with its joys and its sorrows, its successes and its failures, its peace and its turmoil, my attitude is one of serene acceptance and gratitude and not one of angry and arrogant...

The problem of the relation between our bodies and our minds, and espe cially of the link between brain structures and processes on the one hand and mental dispositions and events on the other is an exceedingly difficult one. Without pretending to be able to foresee future developments, both authors of this book think it improbable that the problem will ever be solved, in the sense that we shall really understand this relation. We think that no more can be expected than to make a little progress here or there. We have written this book in the hope that we have been able to do so. We are...

The planning of this Study Week at the Pontifical Academy of Science from September 28 to October 4, 1964, began just two years before when the President, Professor Lemaitre, asked me if 1 would be responsible for a Study Week relating Psychology to what we may call the Neurosciences. 1 accepted this responsibility on the understanding that 1 could have as sistance from two colleagues in the Academy, Professors Heymans and Chagas. Besides participating in the Study Week they gave me much needed assistance and advice in the arduous and, at times, perplexing task that 1 had undertaken, and 1...

In this book the author has collected a number of his important works and added an extensive commentary relating his ideas to those of other prominentnames in the consciousness debate. The view presented here is that of a convinced dualist who challenges in a lively and humorous way the prevailing materialist doctrines of many recent works. Also included is a new attempt to explain mind-brain interaction via a quantum process affecting the release of neurotransmitters. John Eccles received a knighthood in 1958 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology in 1963. He has numerous...

I must thank my friend, Professor HANS WEBER, for being, as it were, the prime mover in causing this book to be written. He persuaded me in 1960 to contribute a review to the Ergebnisse der Physiologie. As originally planned, it was to be relatively short. However, the interest and scope of the whole subject of synapses stimulated me to write a much more comprehensive and extensive account. I was not even then satisfied, particularly as so many new and attractive investigations and ideas were being evolved during and after the writing of this review; and during the writing of this book most...

This book has had a three-fold origin, corresponding to the discoveries made by the three authors and their collaborators during the last few years - mostly since 1962. A most fruitful symposium on the cerebellum was held in Tokyo at the time of the International Physiological Congress in September 1965, and there was then formulated the project of writing this book so as to organize all this new knowledge and make it readily available, and to give opportunity for the con ceptual developments that may be seen in Chapters XI, XII and XV in particular. The present account of the physiological...

The relation between body and mind is one of the oldest riddles that has puzzled mankind. That material and mental events may interact is accepted even by the law: our mental capacity to concentrate on the task can be seriously reduced by drugs. Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical events, upon the mind of the recipient of the letter. This is what the authors of this book call the 'interaction of mental and physical events'. We know very little about this interaction; and...