Word: sherrington
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Courtlandt Sherrington Gross, 41, younger brother and Lockheed's $60,750-a-year vice president and general manager. Lockheed's executives got their strategy and pep talks from Bob Gross, their tactics from Court...
...reflex act must begin with a stimulus outside the body, but man's mind can will motor activity spontaneously, can even pursue pure contemplation (as in pondering a problem). "Between energy [i.e., matter] and mind," says Sherrington, "science has found no 'how' of give and take. . . . Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to lend the psychiatrist much help...
What is Mind? "There remains however among the happenings met with in such a compound organism as ourselves," says Sherrington, "... a certain residue seemingly not thus resoluble" into chemico-physical energy-systems. This nonmaterial residue is the mind. Sherrington's half-century of studying the human brain has proved that mental behavior is not entirely reflex and thus rooted ultimately in matter (as Pavlov's Soviet disciples believe...
Nevertheless, mind, like the brain and body it inhabits, has evolved. Here Physiologist Sherrington is mightily puzzled. "The present individual is the latest bud from an energy-pattern which has without intermission been throwing off buds of its pattern for these last 20 million years or more. . . . The continuum is a material continuum. ... But the long history [of the psychical component] has not been a continuous one. It has been a succession of brief discontinuities. ... At the beginning of each successive generation of the energy-system, the psyche lapsed, only to appear after that physical system had reached a certain...
Biology's Dilemma. This irreducible duality of energy and mind Sherrington calls "the biological dilemma." Mind in a sense is thus supernatural-it stands apart from the energy-system embracing star, rose and dog which we call nature. But mind knows only what its five senses can perceive. Through the long ages of evolving life, these senses have remained five. They were never better integrated than in the human brain. Therefore "Man is the most, not the least earthly of creatures. His knowledge, feeling, strivings, all conspire with his body to make him so to a degree unknown...