The Mental Node

Hi Cho, can I ask your help for something?

Sure John, what’s up? 😊                                                                          

I’m working on a series of articles on the brain for a magazine …

Nice! 😊                                                                                                       

… and I just wanted to do some fact-checking

OK, what can I do for you?                                                                        

So the first article is about consciousness

Oh, interesting, I recently had a conversation with a student about that                                                                       

Good, so the topic is whether we can localize consciousness in the brain 

Ha, I don’t think so!                                                                                    

That’s the conclusion of the article as well, but we want to show why people weren’t crazy to think that it could be done

Fair enough, but what are you basing that on?                                     

Well, we start in the 19th century when people like Flourens were trying to find the “vital node”

I remember reading about that in an intro class, he just started cutting in the brainstem of rabbits!                                    

Yep, to see what would happen, until he found one spot where the animal stopped moving completely

My kids would kill me if I did work like that …  😄                                

Sure, stuff like this isn’t really justifiable anymore, but he thought he had found something really fundamental

My student had a whole list of people trying to find something like that by various means                                                

Interesting! Do you remember who? We might include some more examples …

Sure, let met pull up the paper she wrote …  😊