Evening star., 1938-03-26
STARS, MEN AND ATOMS
Notebook of Science Progress in Field,
Laboratory and Study.
BY THOMAS r. HENRY.

The brain is the thinking tool 1t is
not the thinker.
True enough. one cannot do much
thinking without it, any more than one
can write very well without hands. But
it is not the hand that writes. Some
thing behind the hand uses it. Just so
it is not the brain that thinks. Some
thing uses it for thinking.
So contends Dr. Thomas v. Moore,
professor of psychology at the Catholic
University of America, in paper just
published on the relations between con-
sciousness and the nervous system in
which he reviews great amount of ex-
perimental evidence which has accu-
mulated in the last few years.
Just after the war American psychol-
ogy turned strongly materialistic. The
Russian Psychologist, Ivan Pavlov. had
Just published the results of his far
reaching conditioned reflex experiments
with dogs. Stimulations from the oat-
side world-the smell or sight OF food,
an electric shock, etc.-set up nerve i'm
pulses from the eyes, nose, ears and
other external organs to the brain. The
brain, in turn, transferred these i'm
pulses, modified and co-ordinated, to
the glands and the muscles where they
became actions and feelings The brain
did this, supposedly, because it was made
that way An animal, insect or man
became an automaton. 1t was even
contended-not by Pavlov, but by some
of his American followers-that there
was no such thing as consciousness. 1t
was only the sum total OF the brains
automatic reactions
Some psychologists pretended, at
least, to take this seriously and pro-
claimed, rather proudly, that neither
they nor anybody else had any con-
sciousness. Consciousness was just
delusion. A dog was no more conscious
because it bit when struck than a
jack-in-the- is conscious when it
jumps up when the cover is lifted. This
led to lot of confusion. 1t was just
calling rose by another name, OF course,
because even the most contentious anti
consciousness crusaders actually knew
that they themselves were conscious
The difficulty was to prove 1t rigidly to
anybody else.
In those days almost any operation
on the brain was likely to prove fatal.
At least the surgeons thought so. But
within the last four or five years I'M
proved surgical techniques and greater
daring on the part Of operators have
made 1t possible to cut away almost
every part of the cortex of the brain
the supposed jack-in-the-box reactor-
with the patients surviving SO that the
results could be noted. From the results
OF these and lot of other evidence DR..
Moore is able to make a scientific case
for something like plain common sense.
Says DR.. Moore: IF human being
suffers the loss of whole hemisphere,
either right or left, or if he loses both
prefrontal regions and survives the
shock. his whole past experience seems
to remain intact and available for the
control of conduct. Even when the left
hemisphere is lost in right-handed
individual this individual is capable
eventually of rearranging the neuro-
logical connections so as to acquire
again not only all movements of both
arms and legs, but speech as well. Even
sensations from the side opposite the
injury, which theoretically should never
again be possible, will in due season re-
turn again with but few exceptions.
Various habits that have been formed
are not always entirely lost by destruc-
ton of motor or visual centers normally
involved In their performance. In some
animals 1t seems that practically the
whole cortex may be destroyed and sttll
hahits acquired bef}ke tho operation