Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 21

In the late 1930s, the University of Chicago neurophysiologist Ralph Gerard demonstrated to those of us who were working in his lab that a cut made in the brain cortex did not prevent the transmission of an electrical current across the cut, as long as the severed parts of the brain remained in some sort of contact. I was fascinated by the observation that a crude electrical stimulus could propagate across severed nerves. Gerard suggested that perhaps his experimental observation could account for our perceptions, but I felt that our perceptual experience was more intricate, more patterned, and so needed a finer-grain description of electrical activity to account for it. I discussed this conjecture with Gerard and with my physics professor, asking them whether anyone had observed an extended fine-grain electrical micro-process. Gerard did not know of such a micro-process (nor did my physics professor), but he emphasized that something holistic—something more than simple connections between neurons—was important in understanding brain function.

Later, in the 1950s at Yale University, along with my colleagues, Walter Miles and Lloyd Beck, I was pondering the neural substrate of vision. While still at Chicago, I had written a medical school thesis on retinal processing in color sensation, under the supervision of the eminent vision scientist Stephen Polyak. In that paper I had suggested that beyond the receptors of the retina, the next stage of our visual processing is anatomically organized to differentiate the two or three colors to which our retinas are sensitive into a greater number of more restricted spectral bandwidths. Now, at Yale, Miles, Beck and I were frustrated by our inability to apply what I thought I had learned at Chicago about color to an understanding of vision of patterns, of form. I remember saying to them, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had something like a spectral explanation for processing black-and-white patterns?”