Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 26

More recently, during the 1980s, one of the postdoctoral fellows in my laboratory at Stanford, when he returned to his laboratory in Vienna, Austria, demonstrated a large downward shift in the DC current recorded from the scalp during sleep. This was of great interest to me because Sigmund Freud had described such a shift in his 1895 paper “A Project for a Scientific Psychology.” I assume that one or more of his colleagues, using galvanometers, had made such a demonstration, but there is no actual record that such experiments had been done.

Even more recently, a large upward shift in the DC current was recorded from Sufi and other Islamic subjects while they were in a trance that made it possible for them to painlessly put ice picks through their cheeks and to perform other such ordinarily injurious feats, not only without pain but also without bleeding or tissue damage. These same individuals when not in a trance respond with pain, bleeding and tissue damage as we all do when injured.

Scientific exploration had come up with some most unexpected rewards: Looking for brain correlates of perception proved to be a dead end but revealed surprising results that challenge us to understand the brain processes operating during attention, learning and states of awareness.

As Gerard had argued during my Chicago days, direct (DC) currents must be important for something, but as I had surmised, they are too global to account for the fine structure of the patterns we experience and remember. What we needed for perception and memory was something more like micro-currents. Fortunately, those micro-currents were to appear in a fascinating context during the next decade.