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This is a highly urbane, brilliant, philosophical discourse on the relation between the mind and the function and interconnections of the neural unit. New discoveries in cellular metabolism of the brain strongly suggest that an inherited biochemical aberration is dominant in the causation of schizophrenia. The psychoses may be primarily disturbances of the units of the nervous system, biochemical in nature, and carried in the genes, while the neuroses may be primarily disturbances in the patterns of function and interconnections of the neural units resulting from unfortunate relations of the individual to his environment. The development of cybernetics has directed attention to the question of whether the interactions in the nervous system are continuous or discontinuous. The nerve impulse is discontinuous, behaving in an all-or-none fashion. Synaptic action is continuous and shows graded effects, as do electrical or chemical fields in the brain. Messages enter, leave, or rattle around in the nervous system as discreet signals, yet the interactions within the nervous system that determine patterns of activity are mostly continuous.
Why is consciousness attached to or concomitant with certain acts and experiences? Awareness is most acute in connection with disturbing events, most in abeyance when existence runs placidly. Only when adaptive behavior fails does creative behavior occur, attended by consciousness. In neurological terms, if the automatic response fails to remove the disturbing stimulus, (if the simple negative feedback mechanism fails), then impulses continue to arrive at particular neurone groups in greater numbers than normal. Some kind of summation probably occurs at the synapses. These impulses irradiate to additional neurone groups beyond those normally activated. Progressive radiation of activity in the nervous system under cumulative stimulation reaches the hypothalamus and related structures at the upper end of the old segmental brainst