Word: cortex
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...prefrontal cortex is the seat of mental power which restrains the thalamus -foresight, self-consciousness, social adjustment, imagination, etc. The reasoning, self-conscious cortex is integrated via thousands of millions of nerve cells with the emotional thalamus, so that a normal mind is a more or less harmonious mixture of intellect and emotion. But sometimes this integration takes on a fixed, unhealthy pattern: foresight becomes anxiety, anxiety becomes fear, and the psychotic victim may head for lunacy unless treated by psychoanalysis, shock therapy (e.g., with electricity or insulin) or-as a last resort -psychosurgery...
Robert S. Morison, for a study of the influence of basal structures on the electrical responses of the cerebral cortex...
Engineer of the sex instinct, they said, is a nickel-sized area of tissue at the base of the brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus throws the switch for all man's primitive emotions-rage, fear, desire. Normally the hypothalamus is checked by the more civilized cerebral cortex. But sometimes the leash is broken and the hypothalamus runs wild, ignoring, as a neurologist once remarked, "refinements of decency and convention...
...sponge in a wooden box. The membranes which enfold it, in youth tough as Cellophane, grow delicate as tissue paper. Often they are patterned with small plaques of bone. Brain convolutions shrivel, the valleys growing wider than the hills. Strangely enough, said Dr. Kennedy, only the cerebral cortex, seat of intelligence, grows wrinkled and old. Other more primitive brain structures remain "almost normal." The cells of the cortex, usually some 14 billion, "are reduced in number . . . many have vanished utterly...
...over 25 years modest Dr. Tilney spent long hours with his patients and his laboratory, studying brain tissues of men, apes, rats, reptiles, birds, fish. He believed that most men use only a quarter of the 14 billion cells of the brain cortex. "The brain of modern man," said he, "is only some intermediate stage in the ultimate development of the master organ of life." When man's brain finally bursts into full bloom, he prophesied, depressions and wars will disappear...